WILL 


,  \  . :  I  , ': 


THE  LIBRARY 

OF 

THE  UNIVERSITY 
OF  CALIFORNIA 

LOS  ANGELES 


WILLIAM    BLAKE 


WILLIAM  BLAKE 


BY 


AETHUR    SYMONS 


NEW  YORK 

E.   P.   DUTTON   AND   COMPANY 
1907 


PREFACE 

IT  was  when  Mr.  Sampson's  edition  of  Blake 
came  into  my  hands  in  the  winter  of  1905 
that  the  idea  of  writing  a  book  on  Blake 
first  presented  itself  to  me.  From  a  boy  he 
had  been  one  of  my  favourite  poets,  and  I 
had  heard  a  great  deal  about  him  from  Mr. 
Yeats  as  long  ago  as  1893,  the  year  in  which 
he  and  Mr.  Ellis  brought  out  their  vast 
cyclopaedia,  The  Works  of  William,  Blake, 
Poetic,  Symbolic,  and  Critical.  From  that 
time  to  this  Blake  has  never  been  out  of  my 
mind,  but  I  have  always  hesitated  to  write 
down  anything  on  a  subject  so  great  in  itself, 
and  already  handled  by  great  poets.  Things 
have  been  written  about  Blake  by  Rossetti 
which  no  one  will  ever  surpass ;  and  in  Mr. 
Swinburne's  book  Blake  himself  seems  to 


viii  WILLIAM  BLAKE 

speak  again,  as  through  the  mouth  of  a 
herald.  I  read  these,  I  read  everything  that 
had  been  written  about  him ;  gradually  I 
got  to  know  all  his  work,  in  all  its  kinds  ; 
and  when  I  found,  in  Mr.  Sampson's  book, 
the  rarest  part  of  his  genius,  disentangled 
at  last  from  the  confusions  of  the  commen- 
tators, I  caught  some  impulse — was  it  from 
the  careful  enthusiasm  of  this  editor,  or 
perhaps  straight  from  Blake  ? — and  began 
to  write  down  what  now  filled  and  over- 
flowed my  mind.  Having  begun  on  an 
impulse,  I  laid  my  plans  as  strictly  as  I 
could,  and  decided  to  make  a  book  which 
would  be,  in  its  way,  complete.  There  was 
to  be,  first,  my  own  narrative,  containing, 
as  briefly  as  possible,  every  fact  of  import- 
ance, with  my  own  interpretation  of  what 
I  took  to  be  Blake's  achievements  and  in- 
tentions. But  this  was  to  be  followed  by  a 
verbatim  reprint  of  documents.  These  docu- 
ments were  the  material  of  Gilchrist,  but, 
even  after  Gilchrist's  use  of  them,  they 
remain  of  primary  and  undiminished  im- 


PREFACE  ix 

portance  :    they  are  the  main   evidence  in 
our  case. 

The  documents  which  form  the  second 
part  of  my  book  contain  every  personal 
account  of  Blake  which  was  printed  during 
his  lifetime,  and  between  the  time  of  his 
death  and  the  publication  of  Gilchrist's  Life 
in  1863,  together  with  the  complete  text 
of  every  reference  to  Blake  in  the  Diary, 
Letters,  and  Reminiscences  of  Crabb  Robin- 
son, transcribed  for  the  first  time  from  the 
original  manuscripts.  All  these  I  have  given 
exactly  as  they  stand,  not  correcting  their 
errors,  for  even  errors  have  their  value  as 
evidence.  The  only  other  document  of  the 
period  which  exists  was  written  by  Frede- 
rick Tatham,  within  two  years  of  the  appear- 
ance of  Cunningham's  Life,  and  bound  up 
at  the  beginning  of  a  coloured  copy  of  Blake's 
Jerusalem,  now  in  the  possession  of  Captain 
Archibald  Stirling.  This  manuscript  was 
consulted  by  Mr.  Swinburne  and  afterwards 
by  Mr.  Ellis  and  Mr.  Yeats ;  but  though 
many  extracts  have  been  made  from  it,  it 


x  WILLIAM  BLAKE 

was  printed  for  the  first  time  by  Mr.  Archi- 
bald G.  B.  Russell  in  his  edition  of  The 
Letters  of  William  Blake  (Methuen,  1906). 
This  very  important  volume  completes  the 
task  which  I  have  here  undertaken :  the 
reprint  of  every  record  of  Blake  from  con- 
temporary sources. 

The  mere  contact  with  Blake  seems  to 
awaken  the  natural  generosity  of  those  who 
have  concerned  themselves  with  him.  To 
Mr.  John  Sampson,  the  editor  of  the  only 
accurate  edition  of  Blake's  poems,  I  am 
indebted  for  more  help  and  encouragement 
than  I  can  hope  to  express  in  detail ;  and 
particularly  for  prompting  me  to  a  search 
among  birth  and  marriage  and  death  regis- 
ters, by  which  I  have  been  enabled  to  settle 
several  disputed  points  of  some  interest.  To 
Mr.  A.  G.  B.  Russell  I  owe  constant  personal 
help,  and  the  very  generous  loan  of  the 
proofs  of  his  edition  of  Blake's  Letters,  and 
of  Tatham's  Life,  with  free  leave  to  use  them 
in  the  narrative  which  I  was  writing  at 
a  time  when  his  book  had  not  yet  appeared. 


PREFACE  xi 

Through  this  favour  I  have  been  able  to  take 
such  facts  as  Tatham  is  responsible  for 
directly  from  Tatham,  and  not  at  second- 
hand. I  am  also  indebted  to  Mr.  Russell 
for  reading  my  proofs  and  saving  me  from 
some  errors  of  fact.  I  have  to  thank  Mr. 
Buxton  Forman  for  allowing  me  to  read 
and  describe  the  unpublished  manuscript 
in  Blake's  handwriting  in  his  possession. 
Finally,  my  particular  thanks  are  due  to 
the  Librarian  of  Dr.  Williams's  Library,  Mr. 
Francis  H.  Jones,  for  permission  to  copy  and 
print  the  full  text  of  all  the  references  to 
Blake  in  the  Crabb  Robinson  Manuscripts. 

LONDON,  April  1907. 


LIST  OF  BOOKS  CONSULTED 

1.  Life  of  William  Blake.  By  ALEXANDER  GILCHRIST. 

Two  volumes.  Macmillan,  1863.  New  and 
enlarged  edition,  1880. 

2.  William  Blake :  A  Critical  Essay.     By  ALGERNON 

CHARLES  SWINBURNE.  John  Camden  Hotten, 
1868.  New  edition,  Chatto  &  Windus,  1906. 

3.  The  Poetical  Works  of  William  Blake.    Edited  by 

W.  M.  ROSSETTI.  Aldine  Edition.  Bell  & 
Sons,  1874. 

4.  The  Life  and  Letters  of  Samuel  Palmer.    By  A.  H. 

Palmer.     Seeley  &  Co.,  1892. 

5.  The  Life  of  John  Linnell.     By  ALFRED  T.  STORY. 

Two  volumes.     Bentley,  1892. 

6.  A  Memoir  of  Edward  Calvert.     By  his  third  son 

[SAMUEL  CALVERT].    S.  Low  &  Co.,  1893. 

7.  The  Works  of  William  Blake:  Poetic,  Symbolic,  and 

Critical.  Edited,  with  lithographs  of  the  illus- 
trated Prophetic  Books,  and  a  Memoir  and  Inter- 
pretation, by  EDWIN  JOHN  ELLIS  and  WILLIAM 


xiv  WILLIAM  BLAKE 

BUTLER  YEATS.  Three  volumes.  Quaritch, 
1893. 

8.  The  Poems  of  William  Slake.     Edited  by  W.  B. 

YEATS.  'The  Muses'  Library.'  Lawrence  & 
Bullen,  1893. 

9.  William  Blake:   his  Life,    Character,   and   Genius. 

By  ALFRED  T.  STORY.  Sonnenschein  &  Co., 
1893. 

10.  William  Blake :  Painter  and  Poet.     By  KICHARD 

GARNETT.     'Portfolio,' 1895. 

11.  Ideas    of   Good    and    Evil.      By   W.    B.    YEATS. 

(William  Blake  and  the  Imagination,  William 
Blake  and  his  Illustrations  to  the  Divine 
Comedy.)  A.  H.  Bullen,  1903. 

12.  The  Rossetti  Papers  (1862  to  1870);  a  Compilation 

by  W.  M.  KOSSETTI.     Sands  &  Co.,  1903. 

13.  The  Prophetic  Books  of  William  Blake:  Jerusalem. 

Edited  by  E.  R  D.  MACLAGAN  and  A.  G.  B. 
KUSSELL.  Bullen,  1904. 

H.  The  Poetical  Works  of  William  Blake.  Edited  by 
JOHN  SAMPSON.  Oxford,  1905. 

15.  The  Letters  of  William  Blake ;  together  with  a  Life 
by  FREDERICK  TATHAM.  Edited  by  ARCHIBALD 
G.  B.  KUSSELL.  Methuen,  1906. 


LIST  OF  BOOKS  CONSULTED      xv 

16.  The  Poetical  Works  of  William  Blake.     Edited  and 

annotated  by  EDWIN  J.  ELLIS.  Two  volumes. 
Chatto  &  Windus,  1906.  (The  only  edition 
containing  the  Prophetic  Books.) 

17.  William  Blake.  Vol.  I.  Illustrations  of  the  Book  of 

Job,  with  a  general  Introduction  by  LAURENCE 
BIN  YON.  Methuen,  1906. 

18.  The  Real  Blake.      A    Portrait    Biography.      By 

EDWIN  J.  ELLIS.    Chatto  &  Windus,  1907. 


CONTENTS 
PART  I 

PAGE 

WILLIAM  BLAKE,         .        .        .        .     ;  ?  .      1 

PART  II 

EECOEDS  FROM  CONTEMPORARY  SOURCES  : 

(I.)  EXTRACTS  FROM  THE  DIARY,  LETTERS, 
AND  REMINISCENCES  OF  HENRY  CRABB 
ROBINSON,  TRANSCRIBED  FROM  THE 
ORIGINAL  MSS.  IN  DR.  WILLIAMS'S 
LIBRARY,  1810-1852,  „  .  .  .  251 

(1)  From  Crabb  Robinson's  Diary,      253 

(2)  From  a  Letter  of  Crabb  Robin- 

son to  Dorothy  Wordsworth,      272 

(3)  From  Crabb  Robinson's  Remi- 

niscences,    .         .         ..        .       278 

(II.)  FROM  'A  FATHER'S  MEMOIRS  OF  HIS 
CHILD,'  BY  BENJAMIN  HEATH  MALKIN 
(1806), 307 


xviii  WILLIAM   BLAKE 

PAGE 

(III.)  FROM  LADY  CHARLOTTE  BURY'S  DIARY 

(1820), 331 

(IV.)  BLAKE'S  HOROSCOPE  (1825),         .        .    337 

(V.)  OBITUARY  NOTICES  IN  THE  'LITERARY 
GAZETTE  '  AND  '  GENTLEMAN'S  MAGA- 
ZINE,' 1827,  .  -  •  .  .  .  .343 

(VI.)  EXTRACT    FROM    VARLEY'S    ZODIACAL 

PHYSIOGNOMY  (1828),       .        .        .351 

(VII.)  BIOGRAPHICAL  SKETCH  OF  BLAKE.    BY 

J.  T.  SMITH  (1828),  .        .        .        .355 

(VIII.)  LIFE  OF  BLAKE.    BY  ALLAN  CUNNING- 
HAM (1830),      .        .        .        .        .389 


INTRODUCTION 


WHEN  Blake  spoke  the  first  word  of  the 
nineteenth  century  there  was  no  one  to 
hear  it,  and  now  that  his  message,  the 
message  of  emancipation  from  reality  through 
the  '  shaping  spirit  of  imagination,'  has  pene- 
trated the  world,  and  is  slowly  remaking  it, 
few  are  conscious  of  the  first  utterer,  in 
modern  times,  of  the  message  with  which 
all  are  familiar.  Thought  to-day,  wherever 
it  is  most  individual,  owes  either  force  or 
direction  to  Nietzsche,  and  thus  we  see, 
on  our  topmost  towers,  the  Philistine  armed 
and  winged,  and  without  the  love  or  fear 
of  God  or  man  in  his  heart,  doing  battle 
in  Nietzsche's  name  against  the  ideas  of 
Nietzsche.  No  one  can  think,  and  escape 
Nietzsche ;  but  Nietzsche  has  come  after 
Blake,  and  will  pass  before  Blake  passes. 
The  Marriage  of  Heaven  and  Hell  antici- 


2  WILLIAM  BLAKE 

pates  Nietzsche  in  his  most  significant  para- 
doxes, and,  before  his  time,  exalts  energy 
above  reason,  and  Evil,  '  the  active  springing 
from  energy '  above  Good,  '  the  passive  that 
obeys  reason.'  Did  not  Blake  astonish 
Crabb  Robinson  by  declaring  that  '  there 
was  nothing  in  good  and  evil,  the  virtues 
and  vices ' ;  that  '  vices  in  the  natural  world 
were  the  highest  sublimities  in  the  spiritual 
world '  ?  '  Man  must  become  better  and 
wickeder,'  says  Nietzsche  in  Zarathustra ; 
and,  elsewhere  ;  '  Every  man  must  find  his 
own  virtue.'  Sin,  to  Blake,  is  negation,  is 
nothing ;  'everything  is  good  in  God's  eyes ' ; 
it  is  the  eating  of  the  tree  of  the  knowledge 
of  good  and  evil  that  has  brought  sin  into 
the  world :  education,  that  is,  by  which  we 
are  taught  to  distinguish  between  things 
that  do  not  differ.  When  Nietzsche  says : 
'  Let  us  rid  the  world  of  the  notion  of  sin, 
and  banish  with  it  the  idea  of  punishment/ 
he  expresses  one  of  Blake's  central  doctrines, 
and  he  realises  the  corollary,  which,  how- 
ever, he  does  not  add.  '  The  Christian's 
soul,'  he  says,  'which  has  freed  itself  from 
sin  is  in  most  cases  ruined  by  the  hatred 
against  sin.  Look  at  the  faces  of  great 


INTRODUCTION  3 

Christians.  They  are  the  faces  of  great 
haters.'  Blake  sums  up  all  Christianity  as 
forgiveness  of  sin : 

'  Mutual  forgiveness  of  each  vice, 
Such  are  the  gates  of  Paradise.' 

The  doctrine  of  the  Atonement  was  to  him 
a  '  horrible  doctrine/  because  it  seemed  to 
make  God  a  hard  creditor,  from  whom  pity 
could  be  bought  for  a  price.  '  Doth  Jehovah 
forgive  a  debt  only  on  condition  that  it  shall 
be  paid  ?  .  .  .  That  debt  is  not  forgiven ! ' 
he  says  in  Jerusalem.  To  Nietzsche,  far  as 
he  goes  on  the  same  road,  pity  is  '  a  weak- 
ness, which  increases  the  world's  suffering ' ; 
but  to  Blake,  in  the  spirit  of  the  French 
proverb,  forgiveness  is  understanding.  •  This 
forgiveness,'  says  Mr.  Yeats,  '  was  not  the 
forgiveness  of  the  theologian  who  has 
received  a  commandment  from  afar  off, 
but  of  the  poet  and  artist,  who  believes 
he  has  been  taught,  in  a  mystical  vision, 
"  that  the  imagination  is  the  man  himself," 
and  believes  he  has  discovered  in  the 
practice  of  his  art  that  without  a  perfect 
sympathy  there  is  no  perfect  imagination, 
and  therefore  no  perfect  life.'  He  trusted 


4  WILLIAM   BLAKE 

the  passions,  because  they  were  alive ;  and, 
like  Nietzsche,  hated  asceticism,  because 

'  Abstinence  sows  sand  all  over 
The  ruddy  limbs  and  flaming  hair, 
But  desire  gratified 
Plants  fruits  of  life  and  beauty  there.' 

'  Put  off  holiness/  he  said,  '  and  put  on  in- 
tellect/ And  '  the  fool  shall  not  enter  into 
heaven,  let  him  be  ever  so  holy.'  Is  not 
this  a  heaven  after  the  heart  of  Nietzsche  ? 

Nietzsche  is  a  Spinoza  a  rebours.  The 
essence  of  the  individual,  says  Spinoza,  '  is 
the  effort  by  which  it  endeavours  to  per- 
severe in  its  own  being.'  '  Will  and  under- 
standing are  one  and  the  same.'  '  By  virtue 
and  power  I  understand  the  same  thing.' 
'The  effort  to  understand  is  the  first  and 
sole  basis  of  virtue.'  So  far  it  might  be 
Nietzsche  who  is  speaking.  Only,  in  Spinoza, 
this  affirmation  of  will,  persistent  egoism, 
power,  hard  understanding,  leads  to  a  con- 
clusion which  is  far  enough  from  the  con- 
clusion of  Neitzsche.  '  The  absolute  virtue 
of  the  mind  is  to  understand ;  its  highest 
virtue,  therefore,  to  understand  or  know 
God.'  That,  to  Nietzsche,  is  one  of  'the 
beautiful  words  by  which  the  conscience  is 


INTRODUCTION  5 

lulled  to  sleep.'  '  Virtue  is  power,'  Spinoza 
leads  us  to  think,  because  it  is  virtue ; 
'  power  is  virtue,'  affirms  Nietzsche,  because 
it  is  power.  And  in  Spinoza's  profound 
heroism  of  the  mind,  really  a  great  humility. 
'  he  who  loves  God  does  not  desire  that  God 
should  love  him  in  return,'  Nietzsche  would 
find  the  material  for  a  kind  of  desperate 
heroism,  made  up  wholly  of  pride  and 
defiance. 

To  Blake,  '  God-intoxicated '  more  than 
Spinoza,  '  God  only  acts  and  is,  in  existing 
beings  and  men,'  as  Spinoza  might  also  have 
said  ;  to  him,  as  to  Spinoza,  all  moral  virtue 
is  identical  with  understanding,  and  '  men 
are  admitted  into  heaven,  not  because  they 
have  curbed  and  governed  their  passions, 
but  because  they  have  cultivated  their 
understandings.'  Yet  to  Blake  Spinoza's 
mathematical  approach  to  truth  would  have 
been  a  kind  of  negation.  Even  an  argument 
from  reason  seemed  to  him  atheistical :  to 
one  who  had  truth,  as  he  was  assured, 
within  him,  reason  was  only  'the  bound 
or  outward  circumference  of  energy,'  but 
'  energy  is  the  only  life,'  and,  as  to  Nietzsche, 
is  '  eternal  delight.' 


6  WILLIAM  BLAKE 

Yet,  to  Nietzsche,  with  his  strange, 
scientific  distrust  of  the  imagination,  of 
those  who  so  '  suspiciously '  say  '  We  see 
what  others  do  not  see,'  there  comes  dis- 
trust, hesitation,  a  kind  of  despair,  precisely 
at  the  point  where  Blake  enters  into  his 
liberty.  *  The  habits  of  our  senses,'  says 
Nietzsche,  'have  plunged  us  into  the  lies 
and  deceptions  of  feeling.'  '  Whoever  believes 
in  nature,'  says  Blake,  '  disbelieves  in  God  ; 
for  nature  is  the  work  of  the  Devil.' 
'  These  again/  Nietzsche  goes  on,  '  are  the 
foundations  of  all  our  judgments  and 
"  knowledge,"  there  is  no  escape  whatever, 
no  back-way  or  by-way  into  the  real  world.' 
But  the  real  world,  to  Blake,  into  which  he 
can  escape  at  every  moment,  is  the  world 
of  imagination,  from  which  messengers  come 
to  him,  daily  and  nightly. 

Blake  said  *  The  tigers  of  wrath  are  wiser 
than  the  horses  of  instruction,'  and  it  is 
partly  in  what  they  helped  to  destroy  that 
Blake  and  Nietzsche  are  at  one ;  but 
destruction,  with  Blake,  was  the  gesture  of 
a  hand  which  brushes  aside  needless  hin- 
drances, while  to  Nietzsche  it  was  'an 
intellectual  thing,'  the  outer  militant  part 


INTRODUCTION  7 

of  '  the  silent,  self-sufficient  man  in  the 
midst  of  a  general  enslavement,  who  prac- 
tises self-defence  against  the  outside  world, 
and  is  constantly  living  in  a  state  of  supreme 
fortitude.'  Blake  rejoins  Nietzsche  as  he 
had  rejoined  Spinoza,  by  a  different  road, 
having  fewer  devils  to  cast  out,  and  no 
difficulty  at  all  in  maintaining  his  spiritual 
isolation,  his  mental  liberty,  under  all  cir- 
cumstances. And  to  Blake,  to  be  'myself 
alone,  shut  up  in  myself,'  was  to  be  in  no 
merely  individual  but  in  a  universal  world, 
that  world  of  imagination  whose  gates 
seemed  to  him  to  be  open  to  every  human 
being.  No  less  than  Nietzsche  he  says  to 
every  man :  Be  yourself,  nothing  else 
matters  or  exists ;  but  to  be  myself,  to 
him,  was  to  enter  by  the  imagination  into 
eternity. 

The  philosophy  of  Nietzsche  was  made  out 
of  his  nerves  and  was  suffering,  but  to  Blake 
it  entered  like  sunlight  into  the  eyes. 
Nietzsche's  mind  is  the  most  sleepless  of 
minds ;  with  him  every  sensation  turns 
instantly  into  the  stuff  of  thought;  he  is 
terribly  alert,  the  more  so  because  he  never 
stops  to  systematise ;  he  must  be  for  ever 


8  WILLIAM   BLAKE 

apprehending.  He  darts  out  feelers  in 
every  direction,  relentlessly  touching  the 
whole  substance  of  the  world.  His  appre- 
hension is  minute  rather  than  broad ;  he  is 
content  to  seize  one  thing  at  a  time,  and  he 
is  content  if  each  separate  thing  remains 
separate ;  no  theory  ties  together  or  limits 
his  individual  intuitions.  What  we  call  his 
philosophy  is  really  no  more  than  the  aggre- 
gate of  these  intuitions  coming  to  us  through 
the  medium  of  a  remarkable  personality. 
His  personality  stands  to  him  in  the  place 
of  a  system.  Speaking  of  Kant  and  Schopen- 
hauer, he  says  :  '  Their  thoughts  do  not  con- 
stitute a  passionate  history  of  the  soul.' 
His  thoughts  are  the  passionate  history  of 
his  soul.  It  is  for  this  reason  that  he  is  an 
artist  among  philosophers  rather  than  a  pure 
philosopher.  And  remember  that  he  is  also 
not,  in  the  absolute  sense,  the  poet,  but  the 
artist.  He  saw  and  dreaded  the  weaknesses 
of  the  artist,  his  side-issues  in  the  pursuit 
of  truth.  But  in  so  doing  he  dreaded  one 
of  his  own  weaknesses. 

Blake,  on  the  other  hand,  receives  nothing 
through  his  sensations,  suffers  nothing 
through  his  nerves.  '  I  know  of  no  other 


INTRODUCTION  9 

Christianity/  he  says,  '  and  of  no  other 
Gospel  than  the  liberty  both  of  body  and 
mind  to  exercise  the  divine  arts  of  Imagina- 
tion :  Imagination,  the  real  and  eternal 
world  of  which  this  vegetable  universe  is 
but  a  faint  shadow,  and  in  which  we  shall 
live  in  our  eternal  or  imaginative  bodies, 
when  these  vegetable  mortal  bodies  are  no 
more.'  To  Nietzsche  the  sense  of  a  divine 
haunting  became  too  heavy  a  burden  for 
his  somewhat  inhuman  solitude,  the  solitude 
of  Alpine  regions,  with  their  steadfast 
glitter,  their  thin,  high,  intoxicating  air. 
'  Is  this  obtrusiveness  of  heaven/  he  cries, 
'  this  inevitable  superhuman  neighbour,  not 
enough  to  drive  one  mad  ? '  But  Blake, 
when  he  says,  '  I  am  under  the  direction 
of  messengers  from  heaven,  daily  and 
nightly/  speaks  out  of  natural  joy,  which 
is  wholly  humility,  and  it  is  only  '  if  we 
fear  to  do  the  dictates  of  our  angels,  and 
tremble  at  the  tasks  set  before  us/  it  is  only 
then  that  he  dreads,  as  the  one  punishment, 
that  '  every  one  in  eternity  will  leave  him.' 


10  WILLIAM  BLAKE 


II 

'  THEBE  are  three  powers  in  man  of  con- 
versing with  Paradise,'  said  Blake,  and  he 
defined  them  as  the  three  sons  of  Noah  who 
survived  the  flood,  and  who  are  Poetry, 
Painting,  and  Music.  Through  all  three 
powers,  and  to  the  last  moments  of  his  life 
on  earth,  Blake  conversed  with  Paradise. 
We  are  told  that  he  used  to  sing  his  own 
songs  to  his  own  music,  and  that,  when  he 
was  dying,  '  he  composed  and  uttered  songs 
to  his  Maker/  and  '  burst  out  into  singing 
of  the  things  he  saw  in  heaven.'  And  with 
almost  the  last  strength  of  his  hands  he  had 
made  a  sketch  of  his  wife  before  he  '  made 
the  rafters  ring,'  as  a  bystander  records, 
with  the  improvisation  of  his  last  breath. 

Throughout  life  his  desire  had  been,  as 
he  said,  '  to  converse  with  my  friends  in 
eternity,  see  visions,  dream  dreams,  and 
prophesy  and  speak  parables  unobserved.' 
He  says  again : 

'  I  rest  not  from  my  great  task 

To  open  the  eternal  worlds,  to  open  the  immortal 
eyes 


INTRODUCTION  11 

Of  Man  inwards  into  the  worlds  of  thought,  into 

eternity, 
Ever  expanding  in  the   bosom   of   God,  the   human 

imagination.' 

And,  writing  to  the  uncomprehending  Hayley 
(who  had  called  him  'gentle,  visionary  Blake'), 
he  says  again  :  '  I  am  really  drunk  with 
intellectual  vision  whenever  I  take  a  pencil 
or  graver  into  my  hand.'  To  the  news- 
papers of  his  time,  on  the  one  or  two 
occasions  when  they  mentioned  his  name, 
he  was  '  an  unfortunate  lunatic ' ;  even  to 
Lamb,  who  looked  upon  him  as  '  one  of  the 
most  extraordinary  persons  of  the  age,'  he 
was  a  man  '  flown,  whither  I  know  not — 
to  Hades  or  a  madhouse.'  To  the  first 
editor  of  his  collected  poems  there  seemed 
to  be  '  something  in  his  mind  not  exactly 
sane  ' ;  and  the  critics  of  to-day  still  discuss 
his  sanity  as  a  man  and  as  a  poet. 

It  is  true  that  Blake  was  abnormal ;  but 
what  was  abnormal  in  him  was  his  sanity. 
To  one  who  believed  that  'The  ruins  of 
Time  build  mansions  in  eternity,'  that 
'  imagination  is  eternity,'  and  that  '  our 
deceased  friends  are  more  really  with  us 
than  when  they  were  apparent  to  our  mortal 


12  WILLIAM  BLAKE 

part/  there  could  be  none  of  that  confusion 
at  the  edge  of  mystery  which  makes  a  man 
mad  because  he  is  unconscious  of  the  gulf. 
No  one  was  ever  more  conscious  than  Blake 
was  of  the  limits  of  that  region  which  we 
call  reality  and  of  that  other  region  which 
we  call  imagination.  It  pleased  him  to 
reject  the  one  and  to  dwell  in  the  other, 
and  his  choice  was  not  the  choice  of  most 
men,  but  of  some  of  those  who  have  been 
the  greatest  saints  and  the  greatest  artists. 
And,  like  the  most  authentic  among  them, 
he  walked  firmly  among  those  realities  to 
which  he  cared  to  give  no  more  than  a  side- 
glance  from  time  to  time ;  he  lived  his  own 
life  quietly  and  rationally,  doing  always 
exactly  what  he  wanted  to  do,  and  with  so 
fine  a  sense  of  the  subtlety  of  mere  worldly 
manners,  than  when,  at  his  one  moment  of 
worldly  success,  in  1793,  he  refused  the  post 
of  drawing-master  to  the  royal  family,  he 
gave  up  all  his  other  pupils  at  the  same 
time,  lest  the  refusal  should  seem  ungracious 
on  the  part  of  one  who  had  been  the  friend 
of  revolutionaries.  He  saw  visions,  but  not 
as  the  spiritualists  and  the  magicians  have 
seen  them.  These  desire  to  quicken  mortal 


INTRODUCTION  13 

sight  until  the  soul  limits  itself  again,  takes 
body,  and  returns  to  reality ;  but  Blake,  the 
inner  mystic,  desired  only  to  quicken  that 
imagination  which  he  knew  to  be  more  real 
than  the  reality  of  nature.  Why  should 
he  call  up  shadows  when  he  could  talk  in 
the  spirit  with  spiritual  realities  ?  '  Then 
I  asked/  he  says  in  The  Marriage  of  Heaven 
and  Hell,  '  does  a  firm  persuasion  that  a 
thing  is  so,  make  it  so  ? '  He  replied,  "  All 
poets  believe  that  it  does." ' 

In  the  Descriptive  Catalogue  to  his  ex- 
hibition of  pictures  in  1809,  Blake  defines, 
more  precisely  than  in  any  other  place,  what 
vision  was  to  him.  He  is  speaking  of  his 
pictures,  but  it  is  a  plea  for  the  raising  of 
painting  to  the  same  'sphere  of  invention 
and  visionary  conception '  as  that  which 
poetry  and  music  inhabit.  '  The  Prophets,' 
he  says,  '  describe  what  they  saw  in  vision 
as  real  and  existing  men,  whom  they  saw 
with  their  imaginative  and  immortal  organs  ; 
the  Apostles  the  same ;  the  clearer  the 
organ,  the  more  distinct  the  object.  A 
spirit  and  a  vision  are  not,  as  the  modern 
philosophy  supposes,  a  cloudy  vapour,  or  a 
nothing.  They  are  organised  and  minutely 


14  WILLIAM  BLAKE 

articulated  beyond  all  that  the  mortal  and 
perishing  nature  can  produce.  He  who  does 
not  imagine  in  stronger  and  better  linea- 
ments and  in  stronger  and  better  light  than 
his  perishing  and  mortal  eye  can  see,  does 
not  imagine  at  all.  The  painter  of  this  work 
asserts  that  all  his  imaginations  appear  to 
him  infinitely  more  perfect  and  more  minutely 
organised  than  anything  seen  by  his  mortal 
eye.'  'Inspiration  and  vision,'  he  says  in 
one  of  the  marginal  notes  to  Reynolds's  Dis- 
courses, '  was  then,  and  now  is,  and  I  hope 
will  always  remain,  my  element,  my  eternal 
dwelling-place.'  And  '  God  forbid,'  he  says 
also,  'that  Truth  should  be  confined  to 
mathematical  demonstration.  He  who  does 
not  know  Truth  at  sight  is  not  worthy  of 
her  notice.' 

The  mind  of  Blake  lay  open  to  eternity  as 
a  seed-plot  lies  open  to  the  sower.  In  1802 
he  writes  to  Mr.  Butts  from  Felpham  :  '  I  am 
not  ashamed,  afraid,  or  averse  to  tell  you 
what  ought  to  be  told — that  I  am  under  the 
direction  of  messengers  from  heaven,  daily 
and  nightly.'  'I  have  written  this  poem,' 
he  says  of  the  Jerusalem,  '  from  immediate 
dictation,  twelve  or  sometimes  twenty  or 


INTRODUCTION  15 

thirty  lines  at  a  time,  without  premedita- 
tion, and  even  against  my  will.'  '  I  may 
praise  it/  he  says  in  another  letter,  'since 
I  dare  not  pretend  to  be  any  other  than  the 
secretary ;  the  authors  are  in  eternity.'  In 
these  words,  the  most  precise  claim  for  direct 
inspiration  which  Blake  ever  made,  there  is 
nothing  different  in  kind,  only  in  degree, 
from  what  must  be  felt  by  every  really  crea- 
tive artist  and  by  every  profoundly  and 
simply  religious  person.  There  can  hardly 
be  a  poet  who  is  not  conscious  of  how  little 
his  own  highest  powers  are  under  his  own 
control.  The  creation  of  beauty  is  the  end 
of  art,  but  the  artist  should  rarely  admit  to 
himself  that  such  is  his  purpose.  A  poem 
is  not  written  by  the  man  who  says :  I  will 
sit  down  and  write  a  poem ;  but  rather  by 
the  man  who,  captured  by  rather  than 
capturing  an  impulse,  hears  a  tune  which 
he  does  not  recognise,  or  sees  a  sight  which 
he  does  not  remember,  in  some  '  close  corner 
of  his  brain,'  and  exerts  the  only  energy  at 
his  disposal  in  recording  it  faithfully,  in  the 
medium  of  his  particular  art.  And  so  in 
every  creation  of  beauty,  some  obscure 
desire  stirred  in  the  soul,  not  realised  by  the 


16  WILLIAM  BLAKE 

mind  for  what  it  was,  and,  aiming  at  most 
other  things  in  the  world  than  pure  beauty, 
produced  it.  Now,  to  the  critic  this  is  not 
more  important  to  remember  than  it  is  for 
him  to  remember  that  the  result,  the  end, 
must  be  judged,  not  by  the  impulse  which 
brought  it  into  being,  nor  by  the  purpose 
which  it  sought  to  serve,  but  by  its  success 
or  failure  in  one  thing :  the  creation  of 
beauty.  To  the  artist  himself  this  precise 
consciousness  of  what  he  has  done  is  not 
always  given,  any  more  than  a  precise  con- 
sciousness of  what  he  is  doing.  Only  in  the 
greatest  do  we  find  vision  and  the  correc- 
tion of  vision  equally  powerful  and  equally 
constant. 

To  Blake,  as  to  some  artists  and  to  most 
devout  people,  there  was  nothing  in  vision 
to  correct,  nothing  even  to  modify.  His 
language  in  all  his  letters  and  in  much  of  his 
printed  work  is  identical  with  the  language 
used  by  the  followers  of  Wesley  and  White- 
field  at  the  time  in  which  he  was  writing. 
In  Wesley's  journal  you  will  find  the  same 
simple  and  immediate  consciousness  of  the 
communion  of  the  soul  with  the  world  of 
spiritual  reality :  not  a  vague  longing,  like 


INTRODUCTION  17 

Shelley's,  for  a  principle  of  intellectual 
beauty,  nor  an  unattained  desire  after  holi- 
ness, like  that  of  the  conventionally  re- 
ligious person,  but  a  literal  '  power  of  con- 
versing with  Paradise,'  as  Blake  called  it, 
and  as  many  Methodists  would  have  been 
equally  content  to  call  it.  And  in  Blake, 
as  in  those  whom  the  people  of  that  age 
called  '  enthusiasts '  (that  word  of  reproach 
in  the  eighteenth  century  and  of  honour  in 
all  other  centuries),  there  was  no  confusion 
(except  in  brains  where  '  true  superstition,' 
as  Blake  said,  was  'ignorant  honesty,  and 
this  is  beloved  of  God  and  man ')  between 
the  realities  of  daylight  and  these  other 
realities  from  the  other  side  of  day.  Messrs. 
Ellis  and  Yeats  quote  a  mysterious  note 
written  in  Blake's  handwriting,  with  a  refer- 
ence to  Spurzheim,  page  154.  I  find  that 
this  means  Spurzheim's  Observations  on  the 
Deranged  Manifestations  of  the  Mind,  or 
Insanity  (1817),  and  the  passage  in  the  text 
is  as  follows :  '  Religion  is  another  fertile 
cause  of  insanity.  Mr.  Haslam,  though  he 
declares  it  sinful  to  consider  religion  as  a 
cause  of  insanity,  adds,  however,  that  he 
would  be  ungrateful,  did  he  not  avow  his 


18  WILLIAM  BLAKE 

obligations  to  Methodism  for  its  supply  of 
numerous  cases.  Hence  the  primitive  feel- 
ings of  religion  may  be  misled  and  produce 
insanity ;  that  is  what  I  would  contend  for, 
and  in  that  sense  religion  often  leads  to 
insanity.'  Blake  has  written  :  '  Methodism, 
etc.,  p.  154.  Cowper  came  to  me  and  said  : 
"  Oh !  that  I  were  insane,  always.  I  will 
never  rest.  Can  not  you  make  me  truly 
insane  ?  I  will  never  rest  till  I  am  so. 
Oh !  that  in  the  bosom  of  God  I  was  hid. 
You  retain  health  and  yet  are  mad  as  any  of 
us  all — over  us  all— mad  as  a  refuge  from 
unbelief — from  Bacon,  Newton,  and  Locke." ' 
What  does  this  mean  but  that  'madness,' 
the  madness  of  belief  in  spiritual  things, 
must  be  complete  if  it  is  to  be  effectual,  and 
that,  once  complete,  there  is  no  disturbance 
of  bodily  or  mental  health,  as  in  the  doubt- 
ing and  distracted  Cowper,  who  was  driven 
mad,  not  by  the  wildness  of  his  belief,  but 
by  the  hesitations  of  his  doubt  ? 

Attempts  have  been  made  to  claim  Blake 
for  an  adept  of  magic.  But  whatever  cab- 
balistical  terms  he  may  have  added  to  the 
somewhat  composite  and  fortuitous  naming 
of  his  mythology  ('all  but  names  of  persons 


INTRODUCTION  19 

and  places/  he  says,  'is  invention,  both  in 
poetry  and  painting '),  his  whole  mental  atti- 
tude was  opposed  to  that  of  the  practisers 
of  magic.  We  have  no  record  of  his  ever 
having  evoked  a  vision,  but  only  of  his 
accepting  or  enduring  visions.  Blake  was, 
above  all,  spontaneous :  the  practiser  of 
magic  is  a  deliberate  craftsman  in  the  art 
of  the  soul.  I  can  no  more  imagine  Blake 
sitting  down  to  juggle  with  symbols  or  to 
gaze  into  a  pool  of  ink  than  I  can  imagine 
him  searching  out  words  that  would  make 
the  best  effects  in  his  lyrics,  or  fishing  for 
inspiration,  pen  in  hand,  in  his  own  ink-pot. 
A  man  does  not  beg  at  the  gate  of  dreams 
when  he  is  the  master  for  whose  entrance 
the  gate  stands  open. 

Of  the  definite  reality  of  Blake's  visions 
there  can  be  no  question ;  no  question  that, 
as  he  once  wrote,  *  nothing  can  withstand 
the  fury  of  my  course  among  the  stars  of 
God,  and  in  the  abysses  of  the  accuser.' 
But  imagination  is  not  one,  but  manifold ; 
and  the  metaphor,  professing  to  be  no  more 
than  metaphor,  of  the  poet,  may  be  vision 
as  essential  as  the  thing  actually  seen  by 
the  visionary.  The  difference  between  im- 


20  WILLIAM  BLAKE 

agination  in  Blake  and  in,  say,  Shakespeare, 
is  that  the  one  (himself  a  painter)  has  a 
visual  imagination  and  sees  an  image  or 
metaphor  as  a  literal  reality,  while  the  other, 
seeing  it  not  less  vividly  but  in  a  more 
purely  mental  way,  adds  a  '  like '  or  an  '  as,' 
and  the  image  or  metaphor  comes  to  you 
with  its  apology  or  attenuation,  and  takes 
you  less  by  surprise.  But  to  Blake  it  was 
the  universe  that  was  a  metaphor. 


WILLIAM  BLAKE 


THE  origin  of  the  family  of  William  Blake 
has  not  yet  been  found ;  and  I  can  claim  no 
more  for  the  evidence  that  I  have  been  able 
to  gather  than  that  it  settles  us  more  firmly 
in  our  ignorance.  But  the  names  of  his 
brothers  and  sister,  their  dates  and  order 
of  birth,  and  the  date  of  his  wife's  birth, 
have  never,  so  far  as  I  know,  been  correctly 
given.  Even  the  date  of  his  own  birth  has 
been  contested  by  Mr.  Swinburne  '  on  good 
MS.  authority,'  which  we  know  to  be  that 
of  Frederick  Tatham,  who  further  asserts, 
wrongly,  that  James  was  younger  than 
William,  and  that  John  was  'the  eldest 
son/  Gilchrist  makes  no  reference  to  John, 
but  says,  wrongly,  that  James  was  '  a  year 
and  a  half  William's  senior,'  and  that  William 
had  a  sister  'nearly  seven  years  younger 
than  himself ;  of  whom,  says  Mr.  Yeats, 


21 


22  WILLIAM  BLAKE 

'  we  hear  little,  and  among  that  little  not 
even  her  name.'  Most  of  these  problems 
can  be  settled  by  the  entries  in  parish  re- 
gisters, and  I  have  begun  with  the  registers 
of  the  church  of  St.  James,  Westminster. 

I  find  by  these  entries  that  James  Blake, 
the  son  of  James  and  Catherine  Blake,  was 
born  July  10,  and  christened  July  15, 
1753  ;  John  Blake  ('  son  of  John  and  Cathe- 
rine/ says  the  register,  by  what  is  probably 
a  slip  of  the  pen)  was  born  May  12,  and 
christened  June  1,  1755 ;  William  Blake 
was  born  November  28,  and  christened 
December  11,  1757  ;  another  John  Blake 
was  born  March  20,  and  christened  March 
30,  1760 ;  Richard  Blake  was  born  June 
19,  and  christened  July  11,  1762;  and 
Catherine  Elizabeth  Blake  was  born  January 
7,  and  christened  January  28,  1764.  Here, 
where  we  find  the  daughter's  name  and  the 
due  order  of  births,  we  find  one  perplexity 
in  the  name  of  Richard,  whose  date  of  birth 
fits  the  date  given  by  Gilchrist  and  others 
to  Robert,  William's  favourite  brother, 
whose  name  he  has  engraved  on  a  design 
of  his  'spiritual  form'  in  Milton,  whom  he 
calls  Robert  in  a  letter  to  Butts,  and  whom 


WILLIAM   BLAKE  23 

J.  T.  Smith  recalls  not  only  as  Robert,  but 
as  '  Bob,  as  he  was  familiarly  called.'  In 
the  entry  of  '  John,  son  of  John  and  Cathe- 
rine Blake,'  I  can  easily  imagine  the  clerk 
repeating  by  accident  the  name  of  the  son 
for  the  name  of  the  father ;  and  I  am  in- 
clined to  suppose  that  there  was  a  John 
who  died  before  the  age  of  five,  and  that 
his  name  was  given  to  the  son  next  born. 
Precisely  the  same  repetition  of  name  is 
found  in  the  case  of  Lamb's  two  sisters 
christened  Elizabeth,  and  Shelley's  two 
sisters  christened  Helen.  'My  brother 
John,  the  evil  one,'  would  therefore  be 
younger  than  William ;  but  Tatham,  in 
saying  that  he  was  older,  may  have  been 
misled  by  there  having  been  two  sons 
christened  John. 

There  are  two  theories  as  to  the  origin  of 
Blake's  family ;  but  neither  of  them  has  yet 
been  confirmed  by  the  slightest  documentary 
evidence.  Both  of  these  theories  were  put 
forth  in  the  same  year,  1893,  one  by  Mr. 
Alfred  T.  Story  in  his  William  Blake, 
the  other  by  Messrs.  Ellis  and  Yeats  in 
their  Works  of  William  Blake.  According 
to  Mr.  Story,  Blake's  family  was  connected 


24  WILLIAM  BLAKE 

with  the  Somerset  family  of  the  Admiral, 
through  a  Wiltshire  family  of  Blakes ;  but 
for  this  theory  he  gives  merely  the  report 
of  '  two  ladies,  daughters  of  William  John 
Blake,  of  Southampton,  who  claim  to  be 
second  cousins  of  William  Blake/  and  in 
a  private  letter  he  tells  me  that  he  has  not 
been  able  to  procure  any  documentary 
evidence  of  the  statement.  According  to 
Messrs.  Ellis  and  Yeats,  Blake's  father  was 
Irish,  and  was  originally  called  O'Neil. 
His  father,  John  O'Neil,  is  supposed  to  have 
changed  his  name,  on  marrying  Ellen  Blake, 
from  O'Neil  to  Blake,  and  James  O'Neil, 
his  son  by  a  previous  union,  to  have  taken 
the  same  name,  and  to  have  settled  in 
London,  while  a  younger  son,  the  actual 
son  of  Ellen  Blake,  went  to  Malaga.  This 
statement  rests  entirely  on  the  assertion 
of  Dr.  Carter  Blake,  who  claimed  descent 
from  the  latter;  and  it  has  never  been 
supported  by  documentary  evidence.  In 
answer  to  my  inquiry,  Mr.  Martin  J.  Blake, 
the  compiler  of  two  volumes  of  Blake 
Family  Records  (first  series,  1300-1600 ; 
second  series,  1 600-1700),  writes  :  '  Although 
I  have  made  a  special  study  of  the  genealo- 


WILLIAM  BLAKE  25 

gies  of  the  Blakes  of  Ireland,  I  have  not 
come  across  any  Ellen  Blake  who  married 
John  O'Neil  who  afterwards  (as  is  said  by 
Messrs.  Ellis  and  Yeats)  adopted  the  sur- 
name of  Blake.' 

Mr.  Sampson  points  out  that  Blake's 
father  was  certainly  a  Protestant.  He  is 
sometimes  described  as  a  Swedenborgian, 
always  as  a  Dissenter,  and  it  is  curious  that 
about  half  of  the  Blakes  recorded  in  the 
Dictionary  of  National  Biography  were 
also  conspicuous  as  Puritans  or  Dissenters. 
Mr.  Sampson  further  points  out  that  Blake 
in  one  of  his  poems  speaks  of  himself  as 
'  English  Blake.'  It  is  true  that  he  is 
contrasting  himself  with  the  German  Klop- 
stock ;  yet  I  scarcely  think  an  Irishman 
would  have  used  the  expression  even  for 
contrast.  Blake  is  nowhere  referred  to  as 
having  been  in  any  way  Irish,  and  the  only 
apparent  exception  to  this  is  one  which  I  am 
obliged  to  set  up  with  one  hand  and  knock 
down  with  the  other.  In  the  index  to  Crabb 
Kobinson's  Diary  one  of  the  references  to 
Blake  shows  us  Mr.  Sheil  speaking  at  the 
Academical  Society  while  '  Blake,  his 
countryman,  kept  watching  him  to  keep 


26  WILLIAM   BLAKE 

him  in  order.'  That  this  does  not  refer  to 
William  Blake  I  have  found  by  tracking 
through  the  unpublished  portions  of  the 
Diary  in  the  original  manuscript  the 
numerous  references  to  'a  Mr.  Blake'  who 
was  accustomed  to  speak  at  the  meetings 
of  the  Academical  Society.  He  is  described 
as  '  a  Mr.  Blake  who  spoke  with  good  sense 
on  the  Irish  side,  and  argued  from  the  Irish 
History  and  the  circumstances  which  at- 
tended the  passing  of  the  bills.'  He  after- 
wards speaks  '  sharply  and  coarsely,'  and 
answers  Mr.  Robinson's  hour-long  conten- 
tion that  the  House  of  Commons  should,  or 
should  not,  '  possess  the  power  of  imprison- 
ing for  a  breach  of  privilege/  by  '  opposing 
the  facts  of  Lord  Melville's  prosecution,  the 
Reversion  Bill,  etc.,  etc.,  and  Burke's  Re- 
form Bill ' ;  returning,  in  short,  '  my  civility 
by  incivility.'  This  was  not  the  learn- 
ing, nor  were  these  the  manners,  of  William 
Blake. 

I  would  again  appeal  to  the  evidence  of 
the  parish  register.  I  find  Blakes  in  the 
parish  of  St.  James,  Westminster,  from 
the  beginning  of  the  eighteenth  century,  the 
first  being  a  William  Blake,  the  son  of 


WILLIAM  BLAKE  27 

Richard  and  Elizabeth,  who  was  born 
March  19,  1700.  Between  the  years  1750 
and  1767  (the  time  exactly  parallel  with  the 
births  of  the  family  of  James  and  Catherine 
Blake)  I  find  among  the  baptisms  the  names 
of  Frances,  Daniel,  Reuben,  John  Cartwright, 
and  William  (another  William)  Blake ;  and 
I  find  among  the  marriages,  between  1728 
and  1747,  a  Robert,  a  Thomas,  a  James,  and 
a  Richard  Blake.  The  wife  of  James,  who 
was  married  on  April  15,  1738,  is  called 
Elizabeth,  a  name  which  we  have  already 
found  as  the  name  of  a  Mrs.  Blake,  and 
which  we  find  again  as  the  second  name  of 
Catherine  Elizabeth  Blake  (the  sister  of 
William  Blake),  who  was  born  in  1764. 
I  find  two  Williams,  two  Richards,  and  a 
John  among  the  early  entries,  at  the  begin- 
ning of  the  eighteenth  century.  It  is  im- 
possible to  say  positively  that  any  of  these 
families,  not  less  than  nine  in  number,  all 
bearing  the  name  of  Blake,  all  living  in  the 
same  parish,  within  a  space  of  less  than 
forty  years,  were  related  to  one  another ; 
but  it  is  easier  to  suppose  so  than  to  suppose 
that  one  only  out  of  the  number,  and  one 
which  had  assumed  the  name,  should  have 


28  WILLIAM   BLAKE 

found  itself  accidentally  in  the  midst  of  all 
the  others,  to  which  the  name  may  be 
supposed  to  have  more  definitely  belonged. 

All  that  we  know  with  certainty  of  James 
Blake,  the  father,  is  that  he  was  a  hosier 
('  of  respectable  trade  and  easy  habits,'  says 
Tatham ;  '  of  fifty  years'  standing,'  says  Cun- 
ningham, at  the  time  of  his  death),  that  he 
was  a  Dissenter  (a  Swedenborgian,  or  inclined 
to  Swedenborgianism),  and  that  he  died  in 
1784  and  was  buried  on  July  4  in  Bunhill 
Fields.  The  burial  register  says  :  '  July  4, 
1784.  Mr.  James  Blake  from  Soho  Square  in 
a  grave,  13/6.'  Of  his  wife  Catherine  all 
that  we  know  is  that  she  died  in  1792,  and 
was  also  buried  in  Bunhill  Fields.  The 
register  says:  'Sept.  9,  1792.  Catherine 
Blake ;  age  70 ;  brought  from  St.  James, 
Westminster.  Grave  9  feet;  E.  &  W.  16  ; 
N.  &  S.  42-48.  19/-.'  Tatham  says  that 
'  even  when  a  child,  his  mother  beat  him  for 
running  and  saying  that  he  saw  the  prophet 
Ezekiel  under  a  tree  in  the  fields.'  At 
eight  or  ten  he  comes  home  from  Peckham 
Rye  saying  that  he  has  seen  a  tree  filled 
with  angels ;  and  his  father  is  going  to 
beat  him  for  telling  a  lie ;  but  his  mother 


WILLIAM  BLAKE  29 

intercedes.  It  was  the  father,  Tatham 
says,  who,  noticing  to  what  great  anger 
he  was  moved  by  a  blow,  decided  not  to 
send  him  to  school. 

The  eldest  son,  James,  Tatham  tells  us, 
'  having  a  saving,  somniferous  mind,  lived  a 
yard  and  a  half  life,  and  pestered  his  brother 
with  timid  sentences  of  bread  and  cheese 
advice.'  On  his  father's  death  in  1784  he 
carried  on  the  business,  and  it  was  at  his 
house  that  Blake  held  his  one  exhibition  of 
pictures  in  1809.  'These  paintings  filled 
several  rooms  of  an  ordinary  dwelling-house,' 
says  Crabb  Robinson  in  his  Reminiscences ; 
and,  telling  how  he  had  bought  four  copies 
of  the  catalogue,  'giving  10/-,  I  bargained 
that  I  should  be  at  liberty  to  go  again. 
"  Free !  as  long  as  you  live  ! "  said  the 
brother,  astonished  at  such  a  liberality,  which 
he  had  never  experienced  before  nor  I  dare 
say  did  afterwards.'  Crabb  Robinson  had 
at  first  written  '  as  long  as  you  like/  and  this 
he  altered  into  '  as  long  as  you  live,'  as  if 
fancying,  so  long  afterwards  as  1852,  that 
he  remembered  the  exact  word ;  but  in  the 
entry  in  the  Diary,  in  1810,  we  read  '  Oh ! 
as  often  as  you  please ! '  so  that  we  may 


30  WILLIAM  BLAKE 

doubt  whether  the  '  honest,  unpretending 
shopkeeper,'  who  was  looked  upon  by  his 
neighbours,  we  are  told,  as  '  a  bit  mad,' 
because  he  would  '  talk  Swedenborg,'  can  be 
credited  with  all  the  enthusiasm  of  the  later 
and  more  familiar  reading.  James  and 
William  no  longer  spoke  to  one  another 
when,  after  retiring  from  business,  James 
came  to  live  in  Cirencester  Street,  near 
Linnell.  Tatham  tells  us  that  '  he  got  to- 
gether a  little  annuity,  upon  which  he  sup- 
ported his  only  sister,  and  vegetating  to 
a  moderate  age,  died  about  three  years 
before  his  brother  William.' 

Of  John  we  know  only  that  he  was  some- 
thing of  a  scapegrace  and  the  favourite  son 
of  his  parents.  He  was  apprenticed,  at 
some  cost,  to  a  candle-maker,  but  ran  away, 
and,  after  some  help  from  William,  enlisted 
in  the  army,  lived  wildly,  and  died  young. 
Robert,  the  favourite  of  William,  also  died 
young,  at  the  age  of  twenty-five.  He  lived 
with  William  and  Catherine  from  1784  to 
the  time  of  his  death  in  1787,  at  27  Broad 
Street,  helping  in  the  print-shop  of  '  Parker 
and  Blake/  and  learning  from  his  brother 
to  draw  and  engrave.  One  of  his  original 


WILLIAM  BLAKE  31 

sketches,  a  stiff  drawing  of  long,  rigid, 
bearded  figures  staring  in  terror,  quite  in 
his  brother's  manner,  is  in  the  Print  Room 
of  the  British  Museum.  A  story  is  told  of 
him  by  Gilchrist  which  gives  us  the  whole 
man,  indeed  the  whole  household,  in  brief. 
There  had  been  a  dispute  between  him  and 
Mrs.  Blake.  Blake  suddenly  interposed, 
and  said  to  his  wife  :  '  Kneel  down  and  beg 
Robert's  pardon  directly,  or  you  will  never 
see  my  face  again/  She  knelt  down  (think- 
ing it,  as  she  said  afterwards,  '  very  hard,' 
for  she  felt  herself  to  be  in  the  right)  and 
said  :  '  Robert,  I  beg  your  pardon ;  I  am  in 
the  wrong.'  'Young  woman,  you  lie/ said 
Robert,  '  I  am  in  the  wrong/ 

Early  in  1787  Robert  fell  ill,  and  during 
the  last  fortnight  William  nursed  him  with- 
out taking  rest  by  day  or  night,  until,  at 
the  moment  of  death,  he  saw  his  brother's 
soul  rise  through  the  ceiling  'clapping  its 
hands  for  joy ' ;  whereupon  he  went  to 
bed  and  slept  for  three  days  and  nights. 
Robert  was  buried  in  Bunhill  Fields 
on  February  11.  The  register  says: 
"Feb.  11,  1787.  Mr.  Robert  Blake  from 
Golden  Square  in  a  grave,  13/6/  But  his 


32  WILLIAM  BLAKE 

spiritual  presence  was  never  to  leave  the 
mind  of  William  Blake,  whom  in  1800  we 
find  writing  to  Hayley  :  '  Thirteen  years  ago 
I  lost  a  brother,  and  with  his  spirit  I  con- 
verse daily  and  hourly  in  the  spirit,  and  see 
him  in  remembrance,  in  the  regions  of  my 
imagination.  I  hear  his  advice,  and  even 
now  write  from  his  dictate.'  It  was  Robert 
whom  he  saw  in  a  dream,  not  long  after  his 
death,  telling  him  the  method  by  which  he 
was  to  engrave  his  poems  and  designs.  The 
spiritual  forms  of  William  and  of  Robert,  in 
almost  exact  parallel,  are  engraved  on  sepa- 
rate pages  of  the  Prophetic  Book  of  Milton. 
Of  the  sister,  Catherine  Elizabeth,  we 
know  only  that  she  lived  with  Blake  and 
his  wife  at  Felpham.  He  refers  to  her  in 
several  letters,  and  in  the  poem  sent  to 
Butts  on  October  2,  1800,  he  speaks  of  her 
as  '  my  sister  and  friend.'  In  another  poem, 
sent  to  Butts  in  a  letter  dated  November 
22,  1802,  but  written,  he  explains,  'above 
a  twelvemonth  ago,  while  walking  from 
Felpham  to  Lavant  to  meet  my  sister/  he 
asks  strangely : 

'  Must  my  wife  live  in  my  sister's  bane, 
Or  my  sister  survive  on  my  Love's  pain  ? ' 


WILLIAM  BLAKE  33 

but  from  the  context  it  is  not  clear  whether 
this  is  meant  literally  or  figuratively.  When 
Tatham  was  writing  his  life  of  Blake,  ap- 
parently in  the  year  1831,  he  refers  to  '  Miss 
Catherine '  as  still  living,  '  having  survived 
nearly  all  her  relations.'  Mrs.  Gilchrist,  in 
a  letter  written  to  Mr.  W.  M.  Rossetti  in 
1862,  reports  a  rumour,  for  which  she  gives 
no  evidence,  that  'she  and  Mrs.  Blake  got 
on  very  ill  together,  and  latterly  never  met 
at  all,'  and  that  she  died  in  extreme 
penury. 


34  WILLIAM  BLAKE 


II 

OF  the  childhood  and  youth  of  Blake  we 
know  little  beyond  what  Malkin  and  Smith 
have  to  tell  us.  From  the  age  of  ten  to  the 
age  of  fourteen  he  studied  at  Pars1  drawing- 
school  in  the  Strand,  buying  for  himself 
prints  after  Raphael,  Dtirer,  and  Michel- 
angelo at  tne  sale-rooms ;  at  fourteen  he 
was  apprenticed  to  Basire,  the  engraver, 
who  lived  at  31  Great  Queen  Street,  and 
in  his  shop  Blake  once  saw  Goldsmith. 
'  His  love  for  art  increasing,'  says  Tatham, 
'  and  the  time  of  life  having  arrived  when 
it  was  deemed  necessary  to  place  him  under 
some  tutor,  a  painter  of  eminence  was 
proposed,  and  necessary  applications  were 
made  ;  but  from  the  huge  premium  required, 
he  requested,  with  his  characteristic  gener- 
osity, that  his  father  would  not  on  any 
account  spend  so  much  money  on  him,  as 
he  thought  it  would  be  an  injustice  to  his 


WILLIAM  BLAKE  35 

brothers  and  sisters.  He  therefore  himself 
proposed  engraving  as  being  less  expensive, 
and  sufficiently  eligible  for  his  future  avoca- 
tions. Of  Basire,  therefore,  for  a  premium 
of  fifty  guineas,  he  learnt  the  art  of  engrav- 
ing.' We  are  told  that  he  was  apprenticed, 
at  his  own  request,  to  Basire  rather  than  to 
the  more  famous  Ryland,  the  engraver  to 
the  king,  because,  on  being  taken  by  his 
father  to  Ryland's  studio,  he  said :  '  I  do 
not  like  the  man's  face  :  it  looks  as  if  he 
will  live  to  be  hanged.'  Twelve  years  later 
Byland  was  hanged  for  forgery. 

Blake  was  with  Basire  for  seven  years, 
and  for  the  last  five  years  much  of  his  time 
was  spent  in  making  drawings  of  Gothic 
monuments,  chiefly  in  Westminster  Abbey, 
until  he  came,  says  Malkin,  to  be  '  himself 
almost  a  Gothic  monument.'  Tatham  tells 
us  that  the  reason  of  his  being  '  sent  out 
drawing,'  as  he  fortunately  was,  instead  of 
being  kept  at  engraving,  was  '  for  the  cir- 
cumstance of  his  having  frequent  quarrels 
with  his  fellow  -  apprentices  concerning 
matters  of  intellectual  argument.' 

It  was  in  the  Abbey  that  he  had  a  vision 
of  Christ  and  the  Apostles,  and  in  the 


36  WILLIAM   BLAKE 

Abbey,  too,  that  he  flung  an  intrusive 
Westminster  schoolboy  from  the  scaffolding, 
'  in  the  impetuosity  of  his  anger,  worn  out 
with  interruption,'  says  Tatham,  and  then 
laid  a  complaint  before  the  Dean  which  has 
caused,  to  this  day,  the  exclusion  of  West- 
minster schoolboys  from  the  precincts. 

It  was  at  this  time  that  Blake  must  have 
written  the  larger  part  of  the  poems  con- 
tained in  the  Poetical  Sketches,  printed  (we 
cannot  say  published)  in  1783,  for  in  the 
'Advertisement'  at  the  beginning  of  the 
book  we  are  told  that  the  '  following  Sketches 
were  the  production  of  untutored  youth, 
commenced  in  his  twelfth,  and  occasionally 
resumed  by  the  author  till  his  twentieth 
year,'  that  is  to  say,  between  the  years 
1768  and  1777.  The  earliest  were  written 
while  Goldsmith  and  Gray  were  still  living, 
the  latest  (if  we  may  believe  these  dates) 
after  Chatterton's  death,  but  before  his 
poems  had  been  published.  Ossian  had 
appeared  in  1760,  Percy's  Reliques  in  1765. 
The  Reliques  probably  had  their  influence 
on  Blake,  Ossian  certainly,  an  influence 
which  returns  much  later,  curiously  mingled 
with  the  influence  of  Milton,  in  the  form 


WILLIAM  BLAKE  37 

taken  by  the  Prophetic  Books.  It  has  been 
suggested  that  some  of  Blake's  mystical 
names,  and  his  '  fiend  in  a  cloud,'  came 
from  Ossian ;  and  Ossian  is  very  evident 
in  the  metrical  prose  of  such  pieces  as 
'  Samson,'  and  even  in  some  of  the  imagery 
('  Their  helmed  youth  and  aged  warriors  in 
dust  together  lie,  and  Desolation  spreads 
his  wings  over  the  land  of  Palestine'). 
But  the  influence  of  Chatterton  seems  not 
less  evident,  an  influence  which  could 
hardly  have  found  its  way  to  Blake  before 
the  year  1777.  In  the  fifth  chapter  of 
the  fantastic  Island  in  the  Moon  (probably 
written  about  1784)  there  is  a  long  dis- 
cussion on  Chatterton,  while  in  the  seventh 
chapter  he  is  again  discussed  in  company 
with  Homer,  Shakespeare,  and  Milton. 
As  late  as  1826  Blake  wrote  on  the  margin 
of  Wordsworth's  preface  to  the  Lyrical 
Ballads  :  '  I  believe  both  Macpherson  and 
Chatterton  that  what  they  say  is  ancient 
is  so,'  and  on  another  page,  '  I  own  myself 
an  admirer  of  Ossian  equally  with  any  poet 
whatever,  of  Rowley  and  Chatterton  also.' 
Whether  it  be  influence  or  affinity,  it  is 
hard  to  say,  but  if  the  *  Mad  Song '  of  Blake 


38  WILLIAM  BLAKE 

has  the  hint  of  any  predecessor  in  our  litera- 
ture, it  is  to  be  found  in  the  abrupt  energy 
and  stormy  masculine  splendour  of  the  High 
Priest's  song  in  '  Aella,'  '  Ye  who  hie  yn 
mokie  ayre';  and  if,  between  the  time  of  the 
Elizabethans  and  the  time  of  '  My  silks  and 
fine  array '  there  had  been  any  other  song  of 
similar  technique  and  similar  imaginative 
temper,  it  was  certainly  the  Minstrel's  song 
in  '  Aella/  '  O  !  synge  untoe  mie  roundelaie.' 

Of  the  direct  and  very  evident  influence 
of  the  Elizabethans  we  are  told  by  Malkin, 
with  his  quaint  preciseness  :  '  Shakespeare's 
Venus  and  Adonis,  Tarquin  and  Liter  ece, 
and  his  Sonnets  .  .  .  poems,  now  little  read, 
were  favourite  studies  of  Mr.  Blake's  early 
days.  So  were  Jonson's  Underwoods  and 
his  Miscellanies.'  '  My  silks  and  fine  array ' 
goes  past  Jonson,  and  reaches  Fletcher,  if 
not  Shakespeare  himself.  And  the  blank 
verse  of  '  King  Edward  the  Third '  goes 
straight  to  Shakespeare  for  its  cadence,  and 
for  something  of  its  manner  of  speech.  And 
there  is  other  blank  verse  which,  among 
much  not  even  metrically  correct,  antici- 
pates something  of  the  richness  of  Keats. 

Some  rags  of  his  time  did  indeed  cling 


WILLIAM  BLAKE  39 

about  him,  but  only  by  the  edges  ;  there  is 
even  a  reflected  ghost  of  the  pseudo-Gothic 
of  Walpole  in  'Fair  Elenor,'  who  comes 
straight  from  the  Castle  of  Otranto,  as 
'  Gwin,  King  of  Norway,'  takes  after  the 
Scandinavian  fashion  of  the  day,  and  may 
have  been  inspired  by  '  The  Fatal  Sisters '  or 
*  The  Triumphs  of  Owen '  of  Gray.  'Blind- 
man's  Buff/  too,  is  a  piece  of  eighteenth- 
century  burlesque  realism.  But  it  is  in 
the  ode  '  To  the  Muses '  that  Blake  for 
once  accepts,  and  in  so  doing  clarifies,  the 
smooth  convention  of  eighteenth  -  century 
classicism,  and,  as  he  reproaches  it  in  its 
own  speech,  illuminates  it  suddenly  with 
the  light  it  had  rejected  : 

'  How  have  you  left  the  ancient  love 

That  bards  of  old  enjoyed  in  you  ! 
The  languid  strings  do  scarcely  move, 
The  sound  is  forced,  the  notes  are  few ! ' 

In  those  lines  the  eighteenth  century  dies 
to  music,  and  from  this  time  forward  we 
find  in  the  rest  of  Blake's  work  only  a  proof 
of  his  own  assertion,  that  'the  ages  are  all 
equal ;  but  genius  is  above  the  age.' 

In  1778  Blake's  apprenticeship  to  Basire 


40  WILLIAM  BLAKE 

came  to  an  end,  and  for  a  short  time  he 
studied  in  the  Antique  School  at  the  newly 
founded  Royal  Academy  under  Moser,  the 
first  keeper.  In  the  Life  of  Reynolds  which 
prefaces  the  1798  edition  of  the  Discourses, 
Moser  is  spoken  of  as  one  who  'might  in 
every  sense  be  called  the  Father  of  the 
present  race  of  Artists.'  Blake  has  written 
against  this  in  his  copy  :  '  I  was  once  look- 
ing over  the  prints  from  Raphael  and 
Michael  Angelo  in  the  Library  of  the  Royal 
Academy.  Moser  came  to  me  and  said, 
"  You  should  not  study  these  old  hard, 
stiff,  and  dry  unfinished  works  of  art. 
Stay  a  little,  and  I  will  show  you  what  you 
should  study."  He  then  went  and  took 
down  Le  Bran's  and  Rubens'  Galleries. 
How  did  I  secretly  rage.  I  also  spoke  my 
mind.  I  said  to  Moser,  "  These  things  that 
you  call  finished  are  not  even  begun :  how 
can  they  then  be  finished  ?  The  man 
who  does  not  know  the  beginning  never 
can  know  the  end  of  art.'"  Malkin  tells 
us  that  Blake  '  professed  drawing  from  life 
always  to  have  been  hateful  to  him ;  and 
speaks  of  it  as  looking  more  like  death,  or 
smelling  of  mortality.  Yet  still  he  drew  a 


WILLIAM  BLAKE  41 

good  deal  from  life,  both  at  the  Academy 
and  at  home.'  A  water-colour  drawing 
dating  from  this  time,  '  The  Penance  of 
Jane  Shore,'  was  included  by  Blake  in  his 
exhibition  of  1809.  It  is  the  last  number 
in  the  catalogue,  and  has  the  note :  '  This 
Drawing  was  done  above  Thirty  Years  ago, 
and  proves  to  the  Author,  and  he  thinks 
will  prove  to  any  discerning  eye,  that  the 
productions  of  our  youth  and  of  our  maturer 
age  are  equal  in  all  essential  respects.'  He 
also  did  engravings,  during  several  years, 
for  the  booksellers,  Harrison,  Johnson,  and 
others,  some  of  them  after  Stothard,  who 
was  then  working  for  the  Novelist's  Maga- 
zine. Blake  met  Stothard  in  1780,  and 
Stothard  introduced  him  to  Flaxman,  with 
whom  he  had  himself  just  become  ac- 
quainted. In  the  same  year  Blake  met 
Fuseli,  who  settled  near  him  in  Broad 
Street,  while  Flaxman,  on  his  marriage  in 
1781,  came  to  live  near  by,  at  27  Wardour 
Street.  Bartolozzi  and  John  Varley  were 
both,  then  or  later,  living  in  Broad  Street, 
Angelica  Kauffmann  in  Golden  Square.  In 
1780  (the  year  of  the  Gordon  Riots,  when 
Blake,  carried  along  by  the  crowd,  saw  the 


42  WILLIAM   BLAKE 

burning  of  Newgate)  he  had  for  the  first 
time  a  picture  in  the  Royal  Academy,  the 
water-colour  of  'The  Death  of  Earl  Godwin.' 
It  was  at  this  time,  in  his  twenty-fourth 
year,  that  he  fell  in  love  with  '  a  lively  little 
girl'  called  Polly  Wood.  Tatham  calls  her 
*a  young  woman,  who  by  his  own  account, 
and  according  to  his  own  knowledge,  was  no 
trifler.  He  wanted  to  marry  her,  but  she 
refused,  and  was  as  obstinate  as  she  was 
unkind.'  Gilchrist  says  that  on  his  com- 
plaining to  her  that  she  had  'kept  company' 
with  others  besides  himself,  she  asked  him  if 
he  was  a  fool.  '  That  cured  me  of  jealousy,' 
he  said  afterwards,  but  the  cure,  according 
to  Tatham,  made  him  so  ill  that  he  was  sent 
for  change  of  air  to  '  Kew,  near  Richmond ' 
(really  to  Battersea),  to  the  house  of  '  a 
market -gardener  whose  name  was  Boutcher.' 
While  there,  says  Tatham,  '  he  was  relating 
to  the  daughter,  a  girl  named  Catherine,  the 
lamentable  story  of  Polly  Wood,  his  implac- 
able lass,  upon  which  Catherine  expressed 
her  deep  sympathy,  it  is  supposed,  in  such  a 
tender  and  affectionate  manner,  that  it  quite 
won  him.  He  immediately  said,  with  the 
suddenness  peculiar  to  him,  "  Do  you  pity 


WILLIAM   BLAKE  43 

me  ? "  "  Yes,  indeed  I  do,"  answered  she. 
"  Then  I  love  you,"  said  he  again.  Such  was 
their  courtship.  He  was  impressed  by  her 
tenderness  of  mind,  and  her  answer  indi- 
cated her  previous  feeling  for  him  :  for  she 
has  often  said  that  upon  her  mother's  asking 
her  who  among  her  acquaintances  she  could 
fancy  for  a  husband,  she  replied  that  she 
had  not  yet  seen  the  man,  and  she  has 
further  been  heard  to  say  that  when  she 
first  came  into  the  room  in  which  Blake  sat, 
she  instantly  recognised  (like  Britomart  in 
Merlin's  wondrous  glass)  her  future  partner, 
and  was  so  near  fainting  that  she  left  his 
presence  until  she  recovered.'  Tatham  teDs 
us  that  Blake  '  returned  to  his  lodgings  and 
worked  incessantly'  for  a  whole  year,  'resolv- 
ing that  he  would  not  see  her  until  he  had 
succeeded '  in  making  enough  money  to  be 
able  to  marry  her.  The  marriage  took  place 
at  Battersea  in  August  1762. 

Gilchrist  says  that  he  has  traced  relatives 
of  Blake  to  have  been  living  at  Battersea  at 
the  time  of  his  marriage.  Of  this  he  gives 
no  evidence ;  but  I  think  I  have  found 
traces,  in  Blake's  own  parish,  of  relatives  of 
the  Catherine  Boucher  whom  he  married  at 


44  WILLIAM  BLAKE 

Battersea.  Tatham,  as  we  have  seen,  says 
that  she  was  the  daughter  of  a  market- 
gardener  at  *  Kew,  near  Richmond/  called 
Boutcher,  to  whose  house  Blake  was  sent 
for  a  change  of  air.  Allan  Cunningham 
says  that  'she  lived  near  his  father's  house.' 
I  think  I  have  found  the  reason  for  Cun- 
ningham's mistake,  and  the  probable  occasion 
of  Blake's  visit  to  the  Bouchers  at  Battersea. 
I  find  by  the  birth  register  in  St.  Mary's, 
Battersea,  that  Catherine  Sophia,  daughter 
of  William  and  Ann  Boucher,  was  born 
April  25,  and  christened  May  16,  1762. 
Four  years  after  this,  another  Catherine 
Boucher,  daughter  of  Samuel  and  Betty, 
born  March  28,  1766,  was  christened 
March  31,  1766,  in  the  parish  church  of 
St.  James,  Westminster ;  and  in  the  same 
register  I  find  the  birth  of  Gabriel,  son  of 
the  same  parents,  born  September  1,  and 
christened  September  20,  1767;  and  of 
Ann,  daughter  of  Thomas  and  Ann  Boucher, 
born  June  12,  and  christened  June  29, 
1761.  Is  it  not,  therefore,  probable  that 
there  were  Bouchers,  related  to  one  another, 
living  in  both  parishes,  and  that  Blake's 
acquaintance  with  the  family  living  near 


WILLIAM  BLAKE  45 

him  led  to  his  going  to  stay  with  the  family 
living  at  Battersea  ? 

The  entry  of  Blake's  marriage,  in  the 
register  of  St.  Mary's  Battersea,  gives  the 
name  as  Butcher,  and  also  describes  Blake 
as  '  of  the  parish  of  Battersea,'  by  a  common 
enough  error.  It  is  as  follows  : — 

1782. 
Banns  of  Marriage. 

No.  281  William  Blake  of  the  Parish  of  Batter- 
sea  Batchelor  and  Catherine  Butcher  of  the  same 
Parish  Spinster  were  Married  in  this  Church  by 
License  this  Eighteenth  Day  of  August  in  the 
Year  One  Thousand  Seven  Hundred  and  Eighty 
two  by  me  J.  Gardner  Vicar.  This  Marriage  was 
solemnized  between  Us 

William  Blake 

The  mark  of  X  Catherine  Butcher 

In  the  presence  of  Thomas  Monger  Butcher 
Jas.  Blake 
Eobt.  Munday  Parish  Clerk. 

I  imagine  that  Thomas  Monger  Butcher 
was  probably  Catherine's  brother;  there  are 
other  Mongers  not  far  off  in  the  register,  as 
if  the  name  were  a  family  name.  His  hand- 
writing is  mean  and  untidy,  James  Blake's 


46  WILLIAM  BLAKE 

vague  but  fluent ;  Catherine  makes  her  mark 
somewhat  faintly.  As  the  register  lies  open 
there  are  entries  of  seven  marriages  ;  out  of 
these,  no  fewer  than  three  of  the  brides  have 
signed  by  making  their  mark.  The  name 
William  Blake  stands  out  from  these  '  blotted 
and  blurred '  signatures ;  the  ink  is  very 
black,  as  if  he  had  pressed  hard  on  the  pen  ; 
and  the  name  has  a  '  firm  and  determinate 
outline.' 

Gilchrist  describes  Catherine  Boucher  as 
'a  bright-eyed,  dark-haired  brunette,  with 
expressive  features  and  a  slim,  graceful 
form.'  This  seems  to  be  merely  a  re-writ- 
ing of  Allan  Cunningham's  vague  statement 
that  she  'was  noticed  by  Blake  for  the 
whiteness  of  her  hand,  the  brightness  of 
her  eyes,  and  a  slim  and  handsome  shape, 
corresponding  with  his  own  notions  of  sylphs 
and  naiads.'  But  if  a  quaint  and  lovely 
pencil  sketch  in  the  Rossetti  MS.,  repre- 
senting a  man  in  bed  and  a  woman  sitting 
on  the  side  of  the  bed,  beginning  to  dress, 
is  really,  as  it  probably  is,  done  from  life, 
and  meant  for  Mrs.  Blake,  we  see  at  once 
the  model  for  his  invariable  type  of  woman, 
tall,  slender,  and  with  unusually  long  legs. 


WILLIAM   BLAKE  47 

There  is  a  drawing  of  her  head  by  Blake  in 
the  Rossetti  MS.  which,  though  apparently 
somewhat  conventionalised,  shows  a  clear 
aquiline  profile  and  very  large  eyes ;  still  to 
he  divined  in  the  rather  painful  head  drawn 
by  Tatham  when  she  was  an  old  woman,  a 
head  in  which  there  is  still  power  and  fixity. 
Crabb  Robinson,  who  met  her  in  1825,  says 
that  she  had  '  a  good  expression  in  her  coun- 
tenance, and,  with  a  dark  eye,  remains  of 
beauty  in  her  youth.' 

No  man  of  genius  ever  had  a  better  wife. 
To  the  last  she  called  him  'Mr.  Blake,' 
while  he,  we  are  told,  frequently  spoke  of 
her  as  '  his  beloved.'  The  most  beautiful 
reference  to  her  which  I  find  in  his  letters 
is  one  in  a  letter  of  September  16,  1800,  to 
Hayley,  where  he  calls  her  '  my  dear  and 
too  careful  and  over-joyous  woman,'  and 
says  '  Eartham  will  be  my  first  temple  and 
altar ;  my  wife  is  like  a  flame  of  many 
colours  of  precious  jewels  whenever  she  hears 
it  named.'  He  taught  her  to  write,  and  the 
copy-book  titles  to  some  of  his  water-colours 
are  probably  hers  ;  to  draw,  so  that  after 
his  death  she  finished  some  of  his  de- 
signs ;  and  to  help  him  in  the  printing  and 


48  WILLIAM  BLAKE 

colouring  of  his  engravings.  A  story  is  told, 
on  the  authority  of  Samuel  Palmer,  that  they 
would  both  look  into  the  flames  of  burning 
coals,  and  draw  grotesque  figures  which  they 
saw  there,  hers  quite  unlike  his.  'It  is 
quite  certain,'  says  Crabb  Robinson,  '  that 
she  believed  in  all  his  visions ' ;  and  he 
shows  her  to  us  reminding  her  husband, 
'  You  know,  dear,  the  first  time  you  saw 
God  was  when  you  were  four  years  old,  and 
he  put  his  head  to  the  window,  and  set  you 
a-screaming.'  She  would  walk  with  him 
into  the  country,  whole  summer  days,  says 
Tatham,  and  far  into  the  night.  And  when 
he  rose  in  the  night,  to  write  down  what 
was  '  dictated '  to  him,  she  would  rise  and 
sit  by  him,  and  hold  his  hand.  '  She  would 
get  up  in  the  night,'  says  the  unnamed 
friend  quoted  by  Gilchrist,  '  when  he  was 
under  his  very  fierce  inspirations,  which  were 
as  if  they  would  tear  him  asunder,  while  he 
was  yielding  himself  to  the  Muse,  or  what- 
ever else  it  could  be  called,  sketching  and 
writing.  And  so  terrible  a  task  did  this 
seem  to  be,  that  she  had  to  sit  motionless 
and  silent;  only  to  stay  him  mentally,  with- 
out moving  hand  or  foot ;  this  for  hours, 


WILLIAM  BLAKE  49 

and  night  after  night.'  '  His  wife  being  to 
him  a  very  patient  woman,'  says  Tatham, 
who  speaks  of  Mrs.  Blake  as  '  an  irradiated 
saint,'  '  he  fancied  that  while  she  looked  on 
him  as  he  worked,  her  sitting  quite  still  by 
his  side,  doing  nothing,  soothed  his  impetu- 
ous mind  ;  and  he  has  many  a  time,  when  a 
strong  desire  presented  itself  to  overcome 
any  difficulty  in  his  plates  or  drawings,  in 
the  middle  of  the  night,  risen,  and  requested 
her  to  get  up  with  him,  and  sit  by  his 
side,  in  which  she  as  cheerfully  acquiesced.' 
'  Rigid,  punctual,  firm,  precise,'  she  has  been 
described ;  a  good  housewife  and  a  good 
cook ;  refusing  to  have  a  servant  not  only 
because  of  the  cost,  but  because  no  servant 
could  be  scrupulous  enough  to  satisfy  her. 
'  Finding,'  says  Tatham  '  (as  Mrs.  Blake  de- 
clared, and  as  every  one  else  knows),  the 
more  service  the  more  inconvenience,  she 
.  .  .  did  all  the  work  herself,  kept  the  house 
clean  and  herself  tidy,  besides  printing  all 
Blake's  numerous  engravings,  which  was  a 
task  sufficient  for  any  industrious  woman.' 
He  tells  us  in  another  place  :  *  it  is  a  fact 
known  to  the  writer,  that  Mrs.  Blake's 
frugality  always  kept  a  guinea  or  sovereign 

D 


50  WILLIAM  BLAKE 

for  any  emergency,   of  which  Blake  never 
knew,  even  to  the  day  of  his  death.' 

Tatham  says  of  Blake  at  the  time  of  his 
marriage :  '  Although  not  handsome,  he  must 
have  had  a  most  noble  countenance,  full  of 
expression  and  animation  ;  his  hair  was  of  a 
yellow  brown,  and  curled  with  the  utmost 
crispness  and  luxuriance  ;  his  locks,  instead 
of  falling  down,  stood  up  like  a  curling  flame, 
and  looked  at  a  distance  like  radiations, 
which  with  his  fiery  eye  and  expressive 
forehead,  his  dignified  and  cheerful  physiog- 
nomy, must  have  made  his  appearance  truly 
prepossessing.'  In  another  place  he  says  : 
*  William  Blake  in  stature  was  short  [he  was 
not  quite  five  and  a  half  feet  in  height],  but 
well  made,  and  very  well  proportioned ;  so 
much  so  that  West,  the  great  history  painter, 
admired  much  the  form  of  his  limbs  ;  he 
had  a  large  head  and  wide  shoulders.  Elas- 
ticity and  promptitude  of  action  were  the 
characteristics  of  his  contour.  His  motions 
were  rapid  and  energetic,  betokening  a  mind 
filled  with  elevated  enthusiasm ;  his  forehead 
was  very  high  and  prominent  over  the  fron- 
tals ;  his  eye  most  unusually  large  and  glassy, 
with  which  he  appeared  to  look  into  some 


WILLIAM  BLAKE  51 

other  world.'  His  eyes  were  prominent, 
'  large,  dark,  and  expressive,'  says  Allan 
Cunningham  ;  the  flashing  of  his  eyes  re- 
mained in  the  memory  of  an  old  man  who 
had  seen  him  in  court  at  Chichester  in  1804. 
His  nose,  though  'snubby,'  as  he  himself 
describes  it,  had  '  a  little  clenched  nostril, 
a  nostril  that  opened  as  far  as  it  could,  but 
was  tied  down  at  the  end.'  The  mouth  was 
large  and  sensitive ;  the  forehead,  larger 
below  than  above,  as  he  himself  noted,  was 
broad  and  high ;  and  the  whole  face,  as  one 
sees  it  in  what  is  probably  the  best  likeness 
we  have,  LinnelTs  miniature  of  1827,  was 
full  of  irregular  splendour,  eager,  eloquent, 
ecstatic ;  eyes  and  mouth  and  nostrils  all 
as  if  tense  with  a  continual  suction,  drinking 
up  '  large  draughts  of  intellectual  day '  with 
impatient  haste.  '  Infinite  impatience,'  says 
Swinburne,  *  as  of  a  great  preacher  or  apostle 
— intense  tremulous  vitality,  as  of  a  great 
orator — seem  to  me  to  give  his  face  the 
look  of  one  who  can  do  all  things  but 
hesitate.' 

After  his  marriage  in  August  1782  (which 
has  been  said  to  have  displeased  his  father, 
though  Tatham  says  it  was  '  with  the  appro- 


52  WILLIAM   BLAKE 

bation  and  consent  of  his  parents '),  Blake 
took  lodgings  at  23  Green  Street,  Leicester 
Fields  (now  pulled  down),  which  was  only 
the  square's  length  away  from  Sir  Joshua 
Reynolds.  Flaxman  had  married  in  1781, 
and  had  taken  a  house  at  27  Wardour  Street 
and  it  was  probably  he  who,  about  this  time, 
introduced  Blake  to  '  the  accomplished  Mrs. 
Matthew/  whose  drawing-room  in  Rathbone 
Place  was  frequented  by  literary  and  artistic 
people.  Mr.  Matthew,  a  clergyman  of  taste, 
who  is  said  to  have  '  read  the  church  service 
more  beautifully  than  any  other  clergyman 
in  London,'  had  discovered  Flaxman,  when 
a  little  boy,  learning  Latin  behind  the  counter 
in  his  father's  shop.  '  From  this  incident,' 
says  J.  T.  Smith  in  his  notice  of  Flaxman, 
'  Mr.  Matthew  continued  to  notice  him,  and, 
as  he  grew  up,  became  his  first  and  best 
friend.  Later  on,  he  was  introduced  to 
Mrs.  Matthew,  who  was  so  kind  as  to  read 
Homer  to  him,  whilst  he  made  designs  on 
the  same  table  with  her  at  the  time  she  was 
reading. '  It  was  apparently  at  the  Matthews' 
house  that  Smith  heard  Blake  sing  his  own 
songs  to  his  own  music,  and  it  was  through 
Mrs.  Matthew's  good  opinion  of  these  songs 


WILLIAM  BLAKE  53 

that  she '  requested  the  Rev.  Henry  Matthew, 
her  husband,  to  join  Mr.  Flaxman  in  his 
truly  kind  offer  of  defraying  the  expense 
of  printing  them ' :  to  which  we  owe  the 
'  Poetical  Sketches,  by  W.  B.' ;  printed  in 
1783,  and  given  to  Blake  to  dispose  of  as 
he  thought  fit.  There  is  no  publisher's 
name  on  the  book,  and  there  is  no  reason 
to  suppose  that  it  was  ever  offered  for 
sale. 

'With  his  usual  urbanity/  Mr.  Matthew 
had  written  a  foolish  '  Advertisement '  to 
the  book,  saying  that  the  author  had  '  been 
deprived  of  the  leisure  requisite  to  such  a 
revisal  of  these  sheets,  as  might  have  rendered 
them  less  unfit  to  meet  the  public  eye,'  '  his 
talents  having  been  wholly  directed  to  the 
attainment  of  excellence  in  his  profession.' 
The  book  is  by  no  means  incorrectly  printed, 
and  it  is  not  probable  that  Blake  would 
under  any  circumstances  have  given  his  poems 
more  '  revisal '  than  he  did.  He  did  at  this 
time  a  good  deal  of  engraving,  often  after 
the  designs  of  Stothard,  whom  he  was  after- 
wards to  accuse  of  stealing  his  ideas ;  and 
in  1784  he  had  two,  and  in  1785  four,  water- 
colour  drawings  at  the  Royal  Academy. 


54  WILLIAM  BLAKE 

Fuseli,  Stothard,  and  Flaxman l  seem  to 
have  been  his  chief  friends,  and  it  is  probable 
that  he  also  knew  Cosway,  who  practised 
magic,  and  Cosway  may  have  told  him  about 
Paracelsus,  or  lent  him  Law's  translation  of 
Behmen,  while  Flaxman,  who  was  a  Sweden- 
borgian,  may  have  brought  him  still  more 
closely  under  the  influence  of  Sweden- 
borg. 

In  any  case,  he  soon  tired  of  the  coterie 
of  the  Matthews,  and  we  are  told  that  it 
soon  ceased  to  relish  his  '  manly  firmness 
of  opinion.'  What  he  really  thought  of 
it  we  may  know  with  some  certainty  from 
the  extravaganza,  An  Island  in  the  Moon, 
which  seems  to  belong  to  1784,  and 
which  is  a  light-hearted  and  incoherent 
satire,  derived,  no  doubt,  from  Sterne,  and 

1  Compare  the  lines  written  in  1800  : 
'  I  bless  thee,  0  Father  of  Heaven  and  Earth,  that  ever  I  saw 

Flaxman's  face. 
Angels  stand  round  my  spirit  in  Heaven,  the  blessed  of 

Heaven  are  my  friends  upon  Earth. 
When  Flaxman  was  taken  to  Italy,  Fuseli  was  given  to  me 

for  a  season  .  .  . 
And  my  Angels  have  told  me  that  seeing  such  visions,  I 

could  not  subsist  on  the  Earth, 
But  by  my  conjunction  with  Flaxman,  who  knows  to  forgive 

nervous  fear.' 


WILLIAM  BLAKE  55 

pointing,  as  Mr.  Sampson  justly  says,  to 
Peacock.  It  is  unfinished,  and  was  not 
worth  finishing,  but  it  contains  the  first 
version  of  several  of  the  Songs  of  Innocence, 
as  well  as  the  lovely  song  of  Phoebe  and 
Jellicoe.  It  has  the  further  interest  of  show- 
ing us  Blake's  first,  wholly  irresponsible 
attempt  to  create  imaginary  worlds,  and 
to  invent  grotesque  and  impossible  names. 
It  shows  us  the  first  explosions  of  that 
inflammable  part  of  his  nature,  which  was 
to  burst  through  the  quiet  surface  of  his 
life  at  many  intervals,  in  righteous  angers 
and  irrational  suspicions.  It  betrays  his 
deeply  rooted  dislike  of  science,  and,  here 
and  there,  a  literary  preference,  for  Ossian 
or  for  Chatterton.  The  original  MS.  is  in 
the  Fitzwilliam  Museum,  Cambridge,  and 
in  this  year,  1907,  Mr.  Edwin  J.  Ellis  has 
done  Blake  the  unkindness  of  printing  it  for 
the  first  time  in  full,  in  the  pages  of  his 
Real  Blake.  Blake's  satire  is  only  occasion- 
ally good,  though  occasionally  it  is  supremely 
good ;  his  burlesque  is  almost  always  bad ; 
and  there  is  little  probability  that  he  ever 
intended  to  publish  any  part  of  the  prose 
and  verse  which  he  threw  off  for  the  relief 


56  WILLIAM  BLAKE 

of  personal  irritations  and   spiritual  indig- 
nations. 

In  An  Island  in  the  Moon  we  see  Blake 
casting  off  the  dust  of  the  drawing-rooms, 
finally,  so  far  as  any  mental  obstruction  was 
concerned ;  but  he  does  not  seem  to  have 
broken  wholly  with  the  Matthews,  who,  no 
doubt,  were  people  of  genuinely  good  inten- 
tions ;  and  it  is  through  their  help  that  we 
find  him,  in  1784,  on  the  death  of  his  father, 
setting  up  as  a  print-seller,  with  his  former 
fellow-apprentice,  James  Parker,  at  No.  27 
Broad  Street,  next  door  to  the  house  and 
shop  which  had  been  his  father's,  and  which 
were  now  taken  on  by  his  brother  James. 
Smith  says  that  he  took  a  shop  and  a  first- 
floor  ;  and  here  his  brother  Robert  came  to 
live  with  him  as  his  pupil,  and  remained 
with  him  till  his  death  in  February  1787. 


WILLIAM  BLAKE  57 


III 


AFTER  Robert's  death  Blake  gave  up  the 
print-shop  and  moved  out  of  Broad  Street 
to  Poland  Street,  a  street  running  between 
it  and  Oxford  Street.  He  took  No.  28,  a 
house  only  a  few  doors  down  from  Oxford 
Street,  and  lived  there  for  five  years. 
Here,  in  1789,  he  issued  the  Songs  of 
Innocence,  the  first  of  his  books  to  be  pro- 
duced by  the  method  of  his  invention 
which  he  described  as  'illuminated  print- 
ing.' According  to  Smith,  it  was  Robert 
who  '  stood  before  him  in  one  of  his  vision- 
ary imaginations,  and  directed  him  in  the 
way  in  which  he  ought  to  proceed.'  The 
process  is  thus  described  by  Mr.  Sampson  : 
*  The  text  and  surrounding  design  were 
written  in  reverse,  in  a  medium  impervious 
to  acid,  upon  small  copper -plates,  which 
were  then  etched  in  a  bath  of  aqua-fortis 
until  the  work  stood  in  relief  as  in  a  stereo- 


58  WILLIAM  BLAKE 

type.  From  these  plates,  which  to  econo- 
mise copper  were  in  many  cases  engraved 
upon  both  sides,  impressions  were  printed, 
in  the  ordinary  manner,  in  tints  made  to 
harmonise  with  the  colour  scheme  after- 
wards applied  in  water-colours  by  the  artist.' 
Gilchrist  tells  an  improbable  story  about 
Mrs.  Blake  going  out  with  the  last  half- 
crown  in  the  house,  and  spending  Is.  lOd. 
of  it  in  the  purchase  of  '  the  simple  materials 
necessary.'  But  we  know  from  a  MS.  note 
of  John  Linnell,  referring  to  a  somewhat 
later  date  :  '  The  copper-plates  which  Blake 
engraved  to  illustrate  Hayley's  life  of  Cow- 
per  were,  as  he  told  me,  printed  entirely  by 
himself  and  his  wife  in  his  own  press — a 
very  good  one  which  cost  him  forty  pounds.' 
These  plates  were  engraved  in  1803,  but  it 
is  not  likely  that  Blake  was  ever  able  to 
buy  more  than  one  press. 

The  problem  of  '  illuminated  printing,' 
however  definitely  it  may  have  been  solved 
by  the  dream  in  which  Robert  '  stood  before 
him  and  directed  him/  was  one  which  had 
certainly  occupied  the  mind  of  Blake  for 
some  years.  A  passage,  unfortunately  in- 
complete, in  An  Island  in  the  Moon,  reads  as 


WILLIAM  BLAKE  59 

follows:  '.  .  ."  Illuminating  the  Manuscript  " 
— "  Ay,"  said  she,  "  that  would  be  excellent." 
"  Then,"  said  he,  "  I  would  have  all  the  writ- 
ing engraved  instead  of  printed,  and  at 
every  other  leaf  a  high  finished  print,  all  in 
three  volumes  folio,  and  sell  them  a  hundred 
pounds  a  piece.  They  would  print  off  two 
thousand."  "  Then,"  said  she,  "  whoever  will 
not  have  them,  will  be  ignorant  fools  and 
will  not  deserve  to  live."  This  is  evidently 
a  foreshadowing  of  the  process  which  is 
described  and  defended,  with  not  less  con- 
fident enthusiasm,  in  an  engraved  pro- 
spectus issued  from  Lambeth  in  1793.  I 
give  it  in  full : — 

October  10,  1793. 
TO  THE  PUBLIC. 

The  Labours  of  the  Artist,  the  Poet,  the 
Musician,  have  been  proverbially  attended  by 
poverty  and  obscurity ;  this  was  never  the  fault 
of  the  Public,  but  was  owing  to  a  neglect  of  means 
to  propagate  such  works  as  have  wholly  absorbed 
the  Man  of  Genius.  Even  Milton  and  Shake- 
speare could  not  publish  their  own  works. 

This  difficulty  has  been  obviated  by  the  Author 
of  the  following  productions  now  presented  to  the 


60  WILLIAM   BLAKE 

Public;  who  has  invented  a  method  of  Printing 
both  Letter-press  and  Engraving  in  a  style  more 
ornamental,  uniform,  and  grand,  than  any  before 
discovered,  while  it  produces  works  at  less  than 
one-fourth  of  the  expense. 

If  a  method  of  Printing  which  combines  the 
Painter  and  the  Poet  is  a  phenomenon  worthy  of 
public  attention,  provided  that  it  exceeds  in  ele- 
gance all  former  methods,  the  Author  is  sure  of  his 
reward. 

Mr.  Blake's  powers  of  invention  very  early  en- 
gaged the  attention  of  many  persons  of  eminence 
and  fortune ;  by  whose  means  he  has  been  re- 
gularly enabled  to  bring  before  the  public  works 
(he  is  not  afraid  to  say)  of  equal  magnitude  and 
consequence  with  the  productions  of  any  age  or 
country :  among  which  are  two  large  highly 
finished  engravings  (and  two  more  are  nearly 
ready)  which  will  commence  a  Series  of  subjects 
from  the  Bible,  and  another  from  the  History  of 
England. 

The  following  are  the  Subjects  of  the  several 
Works  now  published  and  on  Sale  at  Mr.  Blake's, 
No.  13  Hercules  Buildings,  Lambeth: — 

1.  Job,  a  Historical  Engraving.      Size  1  ft.  7|- 
in.  by  1  ft.  2  in.     Price  12s. 

2.  Edward  and  Elinor,  a  Historical  Engraving. 
Size  1  ft.  6j  in.  by  1  ft.     Price  10s.  6d. 

3.  America,  a  Prophecy,  in  Illuminated  Printing. 
Folio,  with  18  designs.     Price  10s.  6d. 


WILLIAM  BLAKE  61 

4.  Visions  of  the  Daughters  of  Albion,  in  Illu- 
minated Printing.     Folio,  with  8  designs.     Price 
7s.  6d. 

5.  The  Book  of  Thel,  a  Poem   in   Illuminated 
Printing.     Quarto,  with  6  designs.     Price  3s. 

6.  The  Marriage  of  Heaven  and  Hell,  in  Illumin- 
ated Printing.    Quarto,  with  fourteen  designs.   Price 
7s.  6d. 

7.  Songs  of  Innocence,  in  Illuminated  Printing. 
Octavo,  with  25  designs.     Price  5s. 

8.  Songs  of  Experience,  in  Illuminated  Printing. 
Octavo,  with  25  designs.     Price  5s. 

9.  The  History   of  England,  a  small    book    of 
Engravings.     Price  3s. 

10.  The    Gates   of  Paradise,   a  small   book    of 
Engravings.    Price  3s. 

The  Illuminated  Books  are  Printed  in  Colours, 
and  on  the  most  beautiful  wove  paper  that  could 
be  procured. 

No  Subscriptions  for  the  numerous  great  works 
now  in  hand  are  asked,  for  none  are  wanted ;  but 
the  Author  will  produce  his  works,  and  offer  them 
to  sale  at  a  fair  price. 

By  this  invention  (which  it  is  absurd  to 
consider,  as  some  have  considered  it,  a  mere 
makeshift,  to  which  he  had  been  driven  by 
the  refusal  of  publishers  to  issue  his  poems 
and  engravings  according  to  the  ordinary 


62  WILLIAM   BLAKE 

trade  methods)  Blake  was  the  first,  and 
remains  the  only,  poet  who  has  in  the  com- 
plete sense  made  his  own  books  with  his 
own  hands  :  the  words,  the  illustrations,  the 
engraving,  the  printing,  the  colouring,  the 
very  inks  and  colours,  and  the  stitching  of 
the  sheets  into  boards.  With  Blake,  who 
was  equally  a  poet  and  an  artist,  words  and 
designs  came  together  and  were  inseparable ; 
and  to  the  power  of  inventing  words  and 
designs  was  added  the  skill  of  engraving, 
and  thus  of  interpreting  them,  without 
any  mechanical  interference  from  the  out- 
side. To  do  this  must  have  been,  at  some 
time  or  another,  the  ideal  of  every  poet  who 
is  a  true  artist,  and  who  has  a  sense  of  the 
equal  importance  of  every  form  of  art,  and 
of  every  detail  in  every  form.  Only  Blake 
has  produced  a  book  of  poems  vital  alike  in 
inner  and  outer  form,  and,  had  it  not  been 
for  his  lack  of  a  technical  knowledge  of 
music,  had  he  but  been  able  to  write  down 
his  inventions  in  that  art  also,  he  would 
have  left  us  the  creation  of  something  like 
an  universal  art.  That  universal  art  he  did, 
during  his  own  lifetime,  create ;  for  he  sang 
his  songs  to  his  own  music ;  and  thus,  while  he 


WILLIAM  BLAKE  63 

lived,  he  was  the  complete  realisation  of 
the  poet  in  all  his  faculties,  and  the  only 
complete  realisation  that  has  ever  been 
known. 

To  define  the  poetry  of  Blake  one  must 
find  new  definitions  for  poetry ;  but,  these 
definitions  once  found,  he  will  seem  to  be 
the  only  poet  who  is  a  poet  in  essence ;  the 
only  poet  who  could,  in  his  own  words, 
'  enter  into  Noah's  rainbow,  and  make  a 
friend  and  companion  of  one  of  these  images 
of  wonder,  which  always  entreat  him  to 
leave  mortal  things.'  In  this  verse  there 
is,  if  it  is  to  be  found  in  any  verse,  the 
'  lyrical  cry ' ;  and  yet,  what  voice  is  it  that 
cries  in  this  disembodied  ecstasy  ?  The 
voice  of  desire  is  not  in  it,  nor  the  voice 
of  passion,  nor  the  cry  of  the  heart,  nor  the 
cry  of  the  sinner  to  God,  nor  of  the  lover 
of  nature  to  nature.  It  neither  seeks  nor 
aspires  nor  laments  nor  questions.  It  is 
like  the  voice  of  wisdom  in  a  child,  who  has 
not  yet  forgotten  the  world  out  of  which 
the  soul  came.  It  is  as  spontaneous  as  the 
note  of  a  bird,  it  is  an  affirmation  of  life ; 
in  its  song,  which  seems  mere  music,  it  is 
the  mind  which  sings ;  it  is  lyric  thought. 


64  WILLIAM  BLAKE 

What  is  it  that  transfixes  one  in  any 
couplet  such  as  this  : 

'  If  the  sun  and  moon  should  doubt 
They  'd  immediately  go  out '  ? 

It  is  no  more  than  a  nursery  statement, 
there  is  not  even  an  image  in  it,  and  yet 
it  sings  to  the  brain,  it  cuts  into  the  very 
flesh  of  the  mind,  as  if  there  were  a  great 
weight  behind  it.  Is  it  that  it  is  an  arrow, 
and  that  it  comes  from  so  far,  and  with  an 
impetus  gathered  from  its  speed  out  of  the 
sky? 

The  lyric  poet,  every  lyric  poet  but 
Blake,  sings  of  love ;  but  Blake  sings  of 
forgiveness : 

'  Mutual  forgiveness  of  each  vice, 
Such  are  the  gates  of  Paradise.' 

Poets  sing  of  beauty,  but  Blake  says  : 

'  Soft  deceit  and  idleness, 
These  are  Beauty's  sweetest  dress.' 

They  sing  of  the  brotherhood  of  men,  but 
Blake  points  to  the  '  divine  image ' : 

'  Cruelty  has  a  human  heart, 

And  Jealousy  a  human  face ; 
Terror  the  human  form  divine, 
And  Secrecy  the  human  dress.' 


WILLIAM   BLAKE  65 

Their  minds  are  touched  by  the  sense  of 
tears  in  human  things,  but  to  Blake  '  a  tear 
is  an  intellectual  thing.'  They  sing  of  '  a 
woman  like  a  dewdrop/  but  Blake  of  '  the 
lineaments  of  gratified  desire.'  They  shout 
hymns  to  God  over  a  field  of  battle  or  in 
the  arrogance  of  material  empire  ;  but  Blake 
addresses  the  epilogue  of  his  Gates  of  Para- 
dise '  to  the  Accuser  who  is  the  God  of  this 
world ' : 

'  Truly,  my  Satan,  thou  art  but  a  dunce, 

And  dost  not  know  the  garment  from  the  man ; 
Every  harlot  was  a  virgin  once, 

Nor  canst  thou  ever  change  Kate  into  Nan. 
Though  thou  art  worshipped  by  the  names  divine 

Of  Jesus  and  Jehovah,  thou  art  still 
The  son  of  morn  in  weary  night's  decline, 

The  lost  traveller's  dream  under  the  hill.' 

Other  poets  find  ecstasy  in  nature,  but 
Blake  only  in  imagination.  He  addresses 
the  Prophetic  Book  of  The  Ghost  of  Abel  'to 
Lord  Byron  in  the  wilderness,'  and  asks  : 
*  What  doest  thou  here,  Elijah  ?  Can  a 
poet  doubt  of  the  visions  of  Jehovah? 
Nature  has  no  outline,  but  Imagination  has. 
Nature  has  no  time,  but  Imagination  has. 
Nature  has  no  supernatural,  and  dissolves. 


66  WILLIAM  BLAKE 

Imagination  is  eternity.'  The  poetry  of 
Blake  is  a  poetry  of  the  mind,  abstract  in 
substance,  concrete  in  form ;  its  passion  is 
the  passion  of  the  imagination,  its  emotion 
is  the  emotion  of  thought,  its  beauty  is  the 
beauty  of  idea.  When  it  is  simplest,  its 
simplicity  is  that  of  some  'infant  joy'  too 
young  to  have  a  name,  or  of  some  '  infant 
sorrow '  brought  aged  out  of  eternity  into 
the  '  dangerous  world,'  and  there, 

'  Helpless,  naked,  piping  loud, 
Like  a  fiend  hid  in  a  cloud.' 

There  are  no  men  and  women  in  the  world 
of  Blake's  poetry,  only  primal  instincts  and 
the  energies  of  the  imagination. 

His  work  begins  in  the  garden  of  Eden, 
or  of  the  childhood  of  the  world,  and  there 
is  something  in  it  of  the  naivete  of  beasts  : 
the  lines  gambol  awkwardly,  like  young 
lambs.  His  utterance  of  the  state  of  inno- 
cence has  in  it  something  of  the  grotesque- 
ness  of  babies,  and  enchants  the  grown  man, 
as  they  do.  Humour  exists  unconscious  of 
itself,  in  a  kind  of  awed  and  open-eyed 
solemnity.  He  stammers  into  a  speech  of 
angels,  as  if  just  awakening  out  of  Paradise. 


WILLIAM  BLAKE  67 

It  is  the  primal  instincts  that  speak  first, 
before  riper  years  have  added  wisdom  to 
intuition.  It  is  the  supreme  quality  of  this 
wisdom  that  it  has  never  let  go  of  intuition. 
It  is  as  if  intuition  itself  ripened.  And  so 
Blake  goes  through  life  with  perfect  mastery 
of  the  terms  of  existence,  as  they  present 
themselves  to  him  :  '  perfectly  happy,  want- 
ing nothing,'  as  he  said,  when  he  was  old 
and  poor ;  and  able  in  each  stage  of  life  to 
express  in  art  the  corresponding  stage  of 
his  own  development.  He  is  the  only  poet 
who  has  written  the  songs  of  childhood,  of 
youth,  of  mature  years,  and  of  old  age ;  and 
he  died  singing. 


68  WILLIAM   BLAKE 


IV 


BLAKE  lived  in  Poland  Street  for  five 
years,  and  issued  from  it  the  Songs  of 
Innocence  (1789),  and,  in  the  same  year, 
The  Book  of  Thel,  The  Marriage  of  Heaven 
and  Hell  in  1790,  and,  in  1791,  the  first 
book  of  The  French  Revolution :  a  Poem  in 
Seven  Books,  which  Gilchrist  says  was 
published  anonymously,  in  ordinary  type, 
and  without  illustrations,  by  the  bookseller 
Johnson.  No  copy  of  this  book  is  known  to 
exist.  At  this  time  he  was  a  fervent  be- 
liever in  the  new  age  which  was  to  be 
brought  about  by  the  French  Revolution, 
and  he  was  much  in  the  company  of  revolu- 
tionaries and  freethinkers,  and  the  only 
one  among  them  who  dared  wear  the 
'bonnet  rouge'  in  the  street.  Some  of 
these,  Thomas  Paine,  Godwin,  Holcroft,  and 
others,  he  met  at  Johnson's  shop  in  St. 
Paul's  Churchyard,  where  Fuseli  and  Mary 


WILLIAM  BLAKE  69 

Wollstonecraft  also  came.  It  was  at  John- 
son's, in  1792,  that  Blake  saved  the  life  of 
Paine,  by  hurrying  him  off  to  France,  with 
the  warning,  '  You  must  not  go  home,  or 
you  are  a  dead  man,'  at  the  very  moment 
when  a  warrant  had  been  issued  for  his 
arrest.  Johnson  himself  was  in  1798  put 
into  gaol  for  his  republican  sympathies,  and 
continued  to  give  his  weekly  literary  dinners 
in  gaol. 

Blake's  back-windows  at  Poland  Street 
looked  out  on  the  yard  of  Astley's  circus, 
and  Tatham  tells  a  story  of  Blake's  wonder, 
indignation,  and  prompt  action  on  seeing  a 
wretched  youth  chained  by  the  foot  to  a 
horse's  hobble.  The  neighbour  whom  he  re- 
garded as  '  hired  to  depress  art,'  Sir  Joshua 
Reynolds,  died  in  1792.  A  friend  quoted 
by  Gilchrist  tells  us  :  '  When  a  very  young 
man  he  had  called  on  Reynolds  to  show  him 
some  designs,  and  had  been  recommended 
to  work  with  less  extravagance  and  more 
simplicity,  and  to  correct  his  drawing. 
This  Blake  seemed  to  regard  as  an  affront 
never  to  be  forgotten.  He  was  very  in- 
dignant when  he  spoke  of  it/  There  is 
also  a  story  of  a  meeting  between  Blake  and 


70  WILLIAM  BLAKE 

Reynolds,  when  each,  to  his  own  surprise, 
seems  to  have  found  the  other  very  pleasant. 
Blake's  mother  died  in  1792,  at  the  age 
of  seventy,  and  was  buried  in  Bunhill  Fields 
on  September  9.  In  the  following  year 
he  moved  to  13  Hercules  Buildings,  Lam- 
beth,1 where,  during  the  next  seven  years, 
he  did  engraving,  both  of  his  own  designs 
and  of  those  of  others,  and  published  the 
engraved  book  of  designs  called  The  Gates 
of  Paradise  (1793),  the  poems  and  illustra- 
tions of  the  Songs  of  Experience  (1794),  and 
the  greater  part  of  the  Prophetic  Books, 
besides  writing,  apparently  in  1797,  the 
vast  and  never  really  finished  MS.  of  The 
Four  Zoas.  This  period  was  that  of  which 

1  Gilchrist  (L  98)  gives  a  long  account  of  the  house  which 
he  took  to  be  Blake's,  and  which  he  supposed  to  be  on  the 
west  side  of  Hercules  Road.  But  it  has  been  ascertained 
beyond  a  doubt,  on  the  authority  of  the  Lambeth  rate-books, 
confirmed  by  Norwood's  map  of  London  at  the  end  of  the 
eighteenth  century,  that  Blake's  house,  then  numbered  13 
Hercules  Buildings,  was  on  the  east  side  of  the  road,  and  is 
the  house  now  numbered  23  Hercules  Road.  Before  1842 
the  whole  road  was  renumbered,  starting  at  the  south  end  of 
the  western  side  and  returning  by  the  eastern  side,  so  that 
the  house  which  Gilchrist  saw  in  1863  as  13  Hercules  Build- 
ings was  what  afterwards  became  70  Hercules  Road,  and  is 
now  pulled  down.  The  road  was  finally  renumbered  in  1890, 
and  the  house  became  23  Hercules  Road. 


WILLIAM  BLAKE  71 

we  have  the  largest  and  most  varied  result, 
in  written  and  engraved  work,  together 
with  a  large  number  of  designs,  including 
five  hundred  and  thirty-seven  done  on  the 
margin  of  Young's  Night  Thoughts,  and 
the  earliest  of  the  colour-prints.  It  was 
Blake's  one  period  of  something  like  pros- 
perity, as  we  gather  from  several  stories 
reported  by  Tatham,  who  says  that  during 
the  absence  of  Blake  and  his  wife  on  one  of 
their  long  country  walks,  which  would  take 
up  a  whole  day,  thieves  broke  into  the 
house,  and  '  carried  away  plate  to  the  value 
of  £60  and  clothes  to  the  amount  of  £40 
more.'  Another  £40  was  lent  by  Blake  to 
'  a  certain  freethinking  speculator,  the 
author  of  many  elaborate  philosophical 
treatises,'  who  complained  that '  his  children 
had  not  a  dinner.'  A  few  days  afterwards 
the  Blakes  went  to  see  the  destitute  family, 
and  the  wife  '  had  the  audacity  to  ask  Mrs. 
Blake's  opinion  of  a  very  gorgeous  dress, 
purchased  the  day  following  Blake's  com- 
passionate gift.'  Yet  another  story  is  of  a 
young  art-student  who  used  to  pass  the 
house  every  day  carrying  a  portfolio  under  his 
arm,  and  whom  Blake  pitied  for  his  poverty 


72  WILLIAM  BLAKE 

and  sickly  looks,  and  taught  for  nothing 
and  looked  after  till  he  died.  Blake  had 
other  pupils  too,  among  'families  of  high 
rank/  but  being  '  aghast '  at  the  prospect  of 
*  an  appointment  to  teach  drawing  to  the 
Royal  Family,'  he  gave  up  all  his  pupils, 
with  his  invariably  exquisite  sense  of 
manners,  on  refusing  the  royal  offer. 

It  was  in  1799  that  Blake  found  his  first 
patron,  and  one  of  his  best  friends,  in 
Thomas  Butts,  '  that  remarkable  man — that 
great  patron  of  British  genius,'  as  Samuel 
Palmer  calls  him,  who,  for  nearly  thirty 
years,  with  but  few  intervals,  continued  to 
buy  whatever  Blake  liked  to  do  for  him, 
paying  him  a  small  but  steady  price,  and 
taking  at  times  a  drawing  a  week.  A  story 
which,  as  Palmer  says,  had  '  grown  in  the 
memory/  connects  him  with  Blake  at  this 
time,  and  may  be  once  more  repeated,  if  only 
to  be  discredited.  There  was  a  back-garden 
at  the  house  in  Hercules  Buildings,  and  there 
were  vines  in  it,  which  Blake  would  never 
allow  to  be  pruned,  so  that  they  grew  luxuri- 
ant in  leaf  and  small  and  harsh  in  fruit.  Mr. 
Butts,  according  to  Gilchrist,  is  supposed  to 
have  come  one  day  into  'Blake's  Arcadian 


WILLIAM  BLAKE  73 

Arbour/  as  Tatham  calls  it,  and  to  have 
found  Blake  and  his  wife  sitting  naked, 
reading  out  Milton's  Paradise  Lost  '  in 
character,'  and  to  have  been  greeted  with : 
'  Come  in,  it  is  only  Adam  and  Eve.'  John 
Linnell,  in  some  notes  written  after  reading 
Gilchrist,  and  quoted  in  Story's  Life  of 
Linnell,  writes  with  reason  :  '  I  do  not  think 
it  possible.  Blake  was  very  unreserved  in 
his  narrations  to  me  of  all  his  thoughts  and 
actions,  and  I  think  if  anything  like  this 
story  had  been  true,  he  would  have  told  me 
of  it.  I  am  sure  he  would  have  laughed 
heartily  at  it  if  it  had  been  told  of  him  or  of 
anybody  else,  for  he  was  a  hearty  laugher 
at  absurdities.'  In  such  a  matter,  Linnell 's 
authority  may  well  be  final,  if  indeed  any 
authority  is  required,  beyond  a  sense  of 
humour,  and  the  knowledge  that  Blake  pos- 
sessed it. 

Another  legend  of  the  period,  which  has 
at  least  more  significance,  whether  true  or 
not,  is  referred  to  by  both  Swinburne  and 
Mr.  W.  M.  Rossetti,  on  what  authority  I 
cannot  discover,  and  is  thus  stated  by 
Messrs.  Ellis  and  Yeats :  '  It  is  said  that 
Blake  wished  to  add  a  concubine  to  his 


74  WILLIAM  BLAKE 

establishment  in  the  Old  Testament  manner, 
but  gave  up  the  project  because  it  made 
Mrs.  Blake  cry.'  '  The  element  of  fable,' 
they  add,  'lies  in  the  implication  that  the 
woman  who  was  to  have  wrecked  this  house- 
hold had  a  bodily  existence.  .  .  .  There  is  a 
possibility  that  he  entertained  mentally 
some  polygamous  project,  and  justified  it 
on  some  patriarchal  theory.  A  project  and 
theory  are  one  thing,  however,  and  a  woman 
is  another ;  and  though  there  is  abundant 
suggestion  of  the  project  and  theory,  there 
is  no  evidence  at  all  of  the  woman.'  I  have 
found  in  the  unpublished  part  of  Crabb 
Robinson's  Diary  and  Reminiscences  more 
than  a  '  possibility '  or  even  '  abundant  sug- 
gestion '  that  Blake  accepted  the  theory  as 
a  theory.  Crabb  Robinson  himself  was  so 
frightened  by  it  that  he  had  to  confide  it 
to  his  Diary  in  the  disguise  of  German, 
though,  when  he  came  to  compile  his  Re- 
miniscences many  years  later  he  ventured  to 
put  it  down  in  plain  English  which  no  editor 
has  yet  ventured  to  print.  Both  passages 
will  be  found  in  their  place  in  the  verbatim 
reprint  given  later ;  but  I  will  quote  the 
second  here : 


WILLIAM  BLAKE  75 

'  13th  June  (1826). — I  saw  him  again  in 
June.  He  was  as  wild  as  ever,  says  my 
journal,  but  he  was  led  to-day  to  make 
assertions  more  palpably  mischievous  and 
capable  of  influencing  other  minds,  and  im- 
moral, supposing  them  to  express  the  will 
of  a  responsible  agent,  than  anything  he  had 
said  before.  As  for  instance,  that  he  had 
learned  from  the  Bible  that  wives  should  be 
in  common.  And  when  I  objected  that 
Marriage  was  a  Divine  institution  he  re- 
ferred to  the  Bible,  "  that  from  the  beginning 
it  was  not  so."  He  affirmed  that  he  had 
committed  many  murders,  and  repeated  his 
doctrine,  that  reason  is  the  only  Sin,  and 
that  careless,  gay  people  are  better  than 
those  who  think,  etc.,  etc.' 

This  passage  leaves  no  doubt  as  to  Blake's 
theoretical  view  of  marriage,  but  it  brings 
us  no  nearer  to  any  certainty  as  to  his 
practical  action  in  the  matter.  With  Blake, 
as  with  all  wise  men,  a  mental  decision  in 
the  abstract  had  no  necessary  influence  on 
conduct.  To  have  the  courage  of  your 
opinions  is  one  thing,  and  Blake  always  had 
this  ;  but  he  was  of  all  people  least  impelled 
to  go  and  do  a  thing  because  he  considered 


76  WILLIAM  BLAKE 

the  thing  a  permissible  one  to  do.  Through- 
out all  his  work  Blake  affirms  freedom  as 
the  first  law  of  love ;  jealousy  is  to  him  the 
great  iniquity,  the  unforgivable  selfishness. 
He  has  the  frank  courage  to  praise  in  The 
Visions  of  the  Daughters  of  Albion 

1  Infancy,  fearless,  lustful,  happy,  nestling  for  delight 
In  laps  of  pleasure  !  Innocence,  honest,  open,  seeking 
The  vigorous  joys  of  morning  light ' ; 

and  of  woman  he  asks,  '  Who  taught  thee 
modesty,  subtle  modesty  ? '  In  the  same 
book,  which  is  Blake's  Book  of  Love,  Oothoon 
offers  '  girls  of  mild  silver  or  of  furious 
gold '  to  her  lover ;  in  the  paradisal  state  of 
Jerusalem  ( every  female  delights  to  give 
her  maiden  to  her  husband.'  All  these 
things  are  no  doubt  symbols,  but  they  are 
symbols  which  meet  us  on  every  page  of 
Blake,  and  I  no  not  doubt  that  to  him  they 
represented  an  absolute  truth.  Therefore  I 
think  it  perfectly  possible  that  some 
'  mentally  polygamous  project '  was  at  one 
time  or  another  entertained  by  him,  and 
'  justified  on  some  patriarchal  theory.'  What 
I  am  sure  of,  however,  is  that  a  tear  of  Mrs. 
Blake  ('  for  a  tear  is  an  intellectual  thing ') 
was  enough  to  wipe  out  project  if  not  theory, 


WILLIAM  BLAKE  77 

and  that  one  to  whom  love  was  pity  more 
than  it  was  desire  would  have  given  no 
nearer  cause  for  jealousy  than  some  un- 
mortal  Oothoon. 

It  was  in  1794  that  Blake  engraved  the 
Songs  of  Experience.  Four  of  the  Pro- 
phetic Books  had  preceded  it,  but  here 
Blake  returns  to  the  clear  and  simple  form 
of  the  Songs  of  Innocence,  deepening  it 
with  meaning  and  heightening  it  with 
ardour.  Along  with  this  fierier  art  the 
symbolic  contents  of  what,  in  the  Songs  oj 
Innocence,  had  been  hardly  more  than  a 
child's  strayings  in  earthly  or  divine  Edens, 
becomes  angelic,  and  speaks  with  more  de- 
liberately hid  or  doubled  meanings.  Even 
'  The  Tiger,'  by  which  Lamb  was  to  know 
that  here  was  '  one  of  the  most  extra- 
ordinary persons  of  the  age/  is  not  only 
a  sublime  song  about  a  flame-like  beast,  but 
contains  some  hint  that '  the  tigers  of  wrath 
are  wiser  than  the  horses  of  instruction.'  In 
this  book,  and  in  the  poems  which  shortly 
followed  it,  in  that  MS.  book  whose  contents 
have  sometimes  been  labelled,  after  a  rejected 
title  of  Blake's,  Ideas  of  Good  and  Evil,  we 
see  Blake  more  wholly  and  more  evenly  him- 


78  WILLIAM  BLAKE 

self  than  anywhere  else  in  his  work.  From 
these  central  poems  we  can  distinguish  the 
complete  type  of  Blake  as  a  poet. 

Blake  is  the  only  poet  who  sees  all  tem- 
poral things  under  the  form  of  eternity. 
To  him  reality  is  merely  a  symbol,  and  he 
catches  at  its  terms,  hastily  and  faultily,  as 
he  catches  at  the  lines  of  the  drawing-master, 
to  represent,  as  in  a  faint  image,  the  clear 
and  shining  outlines  of  what  he  sees  with 
the  imagination ;  through  the  eye,  not  with 
it,  as  he  says.  Where  other  poets  use 
reality  as  a  spring-board  into  space,  he 
uses  it  as  a  foothold  on  his  return  from 
flight.  Even  Wordsworth  seemed  to  him 
a  kind  of  atheist,  who  mistook  the  changing 
signs  of '  vegetable  nature '  for  the  unchang- 
ing realities  of  the  imagination.  '  Natural 
objects/  he  wrote  in  a  copy  of  Wordsworth, 
'always  did  and  now  do  weaken,  deaden, 
and  obliterate  imagination  in  me.  Words- 
worth must  know  that  what  he  writes 
valuable  is  not  to  be  found  in  nature.' 
And  so  his  poetry  is  the  most  abstract  of 
all  poetry,  although  in  a  sense  the  most 
concrete.  It  is  everywhere  an  affirmation, 
the  register  of  vision ;  never  observation. 


WILLIAM  BLAKE  79 

To  him  observation  was  one  of  the  daughters 
of  memory,  and  he  had  no  use  for  her  among 
his  Muses,  which  were  all  eternal,  and  the 
children  of  the  imagination.  '  Imagination/ 
he  said,  '  has  nothing  to  do  with  memory.' 
For  the  most  part  he  is  just  conscious  that 
what  he  sees  as  '  an  old  man  grey '  is  no 
more  than  a  '  frowning  thistle ' : 

'  For  double  the  vision  my  eyes  do  see, 
And  a  double  vision  is  always  with  me. 
With  my  inward  eyes,  'tis  an  old  man  grey, 
With  my  outward,  a  thistle  across  my  way.' 

In  being  so  far  conscious,  he  is  only  recog- 
nising the  symbol,  not  admitting  the  reality. 
In  his  earlier  work,  the  symbol  still 
interests  him,  he  accepts  it  without  dis- 
pute ;  with,  indeed,  a  kind  of  transfigur- 
ing love.  Thus  he  writes  of  the  lamb 
and  the  tiger,  of  the  joy  and  sorrow  of 
infants,  of  the  fly  and  the  lily,  as  no  poet 
of  mere  observation  has  ever  written  of 
them,  going  deeper  into  their  essence  than 
Wordsworth  ever  went  into  the  heart  of 
daffodils,  or  Shelley  into  the  nerves  of  the 
sensitive  plant.  He  takes  only  the  simplest 
flowers  or  weeds,  and  the  most  innocent  or 
most  destroying  of  animals,  and  he  uses 


80  WILLIAM  BLAKE 

them  as  illustrations  of  the  divine  attri- 
butes. From  the  same  flower  and  beast 
he  can  read  contrary  lessons  without  change 
of  meaning,  by  the  mere  transposition  of 
qualities,  as  in  the  poem  which  now  reads  : 

'  The  modest  rose  puts  forth  a  thorn, 
The  humble  sheep  a  threatening  horn ; 
While  the  lily  white  shall  in  love  delight, 
Nor  a  thorn,  nor  a  threat,  stain  her  beauty  bright.' 

Mr.  Sampson  tells  us  in  his  notes :  'Be- 
ginning by  writing : 

"The  rose  puts  envious  ..." 

he  felt  that  "envious"  did  not  express  his 
full  meaning,  and  deleted  the  last  three 
words,  writing  above  them  "lustful  rose," 
and  finishing  the  line  with  the  words  "  puts 
forth  a  thorn."  He  then  went  on  : 

"  The  coward  sheep  a  threatening  horn ; 
While  the  lily  white  shall  in  love  delight, 
And  the  lion  increase  freedom  and  peace" ; 

at  which  point  he  drew  a  line  under  the 
poem  to  show  that  it  was  finished.  On  a 
subsequent  reading  he  deleted  the  last  line, 
substituting  for  it : 

1 "  The  priest  loves  war,  and  the  soldier  peace  " ; 


WILLIAM  BLAKE  81 

but  here,  perceiving  that  his  rhyme  had 
disappeared,  he  cancelled  this  line  also,  and 
gave  the  poem  an  entirely  different  turn  by 
changing  the  word  "  lustful "  to  "  modest," 
and  "  coward  "  to  "  humble,"  and  completing 
the  quatrain  (as  in  the  engraved  version) 
by  a  fourth  line  simply  explanatory  of  the 
first  three/  This  is  not  merely  obeying  the 
idle  impulse  of  a  rhyme,  but  rather  a  bring- 
ing of  the  mind's  impulses  into  that  land 
where  'contraries  mutually  exist.' 

And  when  I  say  that  he  reads  lessons, 
let  it  not  be  supposed  that  Blake  was  ever 
consciously  didactic.  Conduct  does  not  con- 
cern him ;  not  doing,  but  being.  He  held  that 
education  was  the  setting  of  a  veil  between 
light  and  the  soul.  '  There  is  no  good  in 
education,'  he  said.  '  I  hold  it  to  be  wrong. 
It  is  the  great  sin.  It  is  eating  of  the  tree 
of  the  knowledge  of  good  and  evil.  This 
was  the  fault  of  Plato.  He  knew  nothing 
but  the  virtues  and  vices,  and  good  and 
evil.  There  is  nothing  in  all  that.  Every- 
thing is  good  in  God's  eyes.'  And,  as  he 
says  with  his  excellent  courage :  '  When  I 
tell  the  truth,  it  is  not  for  the  sake  of  con- 
vincing those  who  do  not  know  it,  but  for 

F 


82  WILLIAM   BLAKE 

the  sake  of  defending  those  who  do ' ;  and, 
again,  with  still  more  excellent  and  harder 
courage :  'When  I  am  endeavouring  to  think 
rightly,  I  must  not  regard  my  own  any 
more  than  other  people's  weaknesses ' ;  so, 
in  his  poetry,  there  is  no  moral  tendency, 
nothing  that  might  not  be  poison  as  well  as 
antidote;  nothing  indeed  but  the  absolute 
affirmation  of  that  energy  which  is  eternal 
delight.  He  worshipped  energy  as  the  well- 
head or  parent  fire  of  life ;  and  to  him  there 
was  no  evil,  only  a  weakness,  a  negation  of 
energy,  the  ignominy  of  wings  that  droop 
and  are  contented  in  the  dust. 

And  so,  like  Nietzsche,  but  with  a  deeper 
innocence,  he  finds  himself  'beyond  good 
and  evil/  in  a  region  where  the  soul  is  naked 
and  its  own  master.  Most  of  his  art  is  the 
unclothing  of  the  soul,  and  when  at  last  it 
is  naked  and  alone,  in  that  '  thrilling '  region 
where  the  souls  of  other  men  have  at  times 
penetrated,  only  to  shudder  back  with  terror 
from  the  brink  of  eternal  loneliness,  then 
only  is  this  soul  exultant  with  the  supreme 
happiness. 


WILLIAM  BLAKE  83 


IT  is  to  the  seven  years  at  Lambeth  that 
what  may  be  called  the  first  period  of  the 
Prophetic  Books  largely  belongs,  though  it 
does  not  indeed  begin  there.  The  roots  of 
it  are  strongly  visible  in  The  Marriage  of 
Heaven  and  Hell,  which  was  written  at 
Poland  Street,  and  they  may  be  traced  even 
further  back.  Everything  else,  until  we 
come  to  the  last  or  Felpham  period,  which 
has  a  new  quality  of  its  own,  belongs  to 
Lambeth. 

In  his  earlier  work  Blake  is  satisfied  with 
natural  symbols,  with  nature  as  symbol ;  in 
his  later  work,  in  the  fioal  message  of  the 
Prophetic  Books,  he  is  no  longer  satisfied 
with  what  then  seems  to  him  the  relative 
truth  of  the  symbols  of  reality.  Dropping 
the  tools  with  which  he  has  worked  so  well, 
he  grasps  with  naked  hands  after  an  absolute 
truth  of  statement,  which  is  like  his  attempt 


84  WILLIAM   BLAKE 

in  his  designs  to  render  the  outlines  of  vision 
literally,  without  translation  into  the  forms 
of  human  sight.  He  invents  names  harsh 
as  triangles,  Enitharmon,  Theotormon,  Rin- 
trah,  for  spiritual  states  and  essences,  and 
he  employs  them  as  Wagner  employed  his 
leading  motives,  as  a  kind  of  shorthand  for 
the  memory.  His  meaning  is  no  longer 
apparent  in  the  ordinary  meaning  of  the 
words  he  uses ;  we  have  to  read  him  with 
a  key,  and  the  key  is  not  always  in  our 
hands  ;  he  forgets  that  he  is  talking  to  men 
on  the  earth  in  some  language  which  he  has 
learnt  in  heavenly  places.  He  sees  symbol 
within  symbol,  and  as  he  tries  to  make  one 
clear  to  us,  he  does  but  translate  it  into 
another,  perhaps  no  easier,  or  more  con- 
fusing. And  it  must  be  remembered,  when 
even  interpreters  like  Mr.  Ellis  and  Mr. 
Yeats  falter,  and  confess  '  There  is  appar- 
ently some  confusion  among  the  symbols/ 
that  after  all  we  have  only  a  portion  of 
Blake's  later  work,  and  that  probably  a 
far  larger  portion  was  destroyed  when  the 
Peckham  '  angel,'  Mr.  Tatham  (copartner  in 
foolish  wickedness  with  Warburton's  cook), 
sat  down  to  burn  the  books  which  he  did 


WILLIAM  BLAKE  85 

not  understand.  Blake's  great  system  of 
wheels  within  wheels  remains  no  better 
than  a  ruin,  and  can  but  at  the  best  be 
pieced  together  tentatively  by  those  who 
are  able  to  trace  the  connection  of  some  of 
its  parts.  It  is  no  longer  even  possible  to 
know  how  much  consistency  Blake  was  able 
to  give  to  his  symbols,  and  how  far  he  failed 
to  make  them  visible  in  terms  of  mortal 
understanding.  As  we  have  them,  they 
evade  us  on  every  side,  not  because  they 
are  meaningless,  but  because  the  secret  of 
their  meaning  is  so  closely  kept.  To  Blake 
actual  contemporary  names  meant  even 
more  than  they  meant  to  Walt  Whitman. 
'  All  truths  wait  in  all  things/  said  Walt 
Whitman,  and  Blake  has  his  own  quite 
significant  but  perplexing  meaning  when 
he  writes: 

'The  corner  of  Broad  Street  weeps;  Poland  Street 
languishes 

To  Great  Queen  Street  and  Lincoln's  Inn :  all  is  dis- 
tress and  woe.' 

He  is  concerned  now  only  with  his  message, 
with  the  '  minutely  particular '  statement  of 
it ;  and  as  he  has  ceased  to  accept  any  mortal 


86  WILLIAM  BLAKE 

medium,  or  to  allow  himself  to  be  penetrated 
by  the  sunlight  of  earthly  beauty,  he  has 
lost  the  means  of  making  that  message 
visible  to  us.  It  is  a  miscalculation  of 
means,  a  contempt  for  possibilities ;  not,  as 
people  were  once  hasty  enough  to  assume, 
the  irresponsible  rapture  of  madness.  There 
is  not  even  in  these  crabbed  chronicles  the 
wild  beauty  of  the  madman's  scattering 
brain  ;  there  is  a  concealed  sanity,  a  precise 
kind  of  truth,  which,  as  Blake  said  of  all 
truth,  '  can  never  be  so  told  as  to  be  under- 
stood, and  not  be  believed.' 

Blake's  form,  or  apparent  formlessness, 
in  the  Prophetic  Books,  was  no  natural 
accident,  or  unconsidered  utterance  of  in- 
spiration. Addressing  the  public  on  the 
first  plate  of  Jerusalem  he  says  :  '  When 
this  verse  was  first  dictated  to  me,  I  con- 
sidered a  monotonous  cadence  like  that  used 
by  Milton  and  Shakespeare  and  all  writers 
of  English  blank  verse,  derived  from  the 
bondage  of  rhyming,  to  be  a  necessary  and 
indispensable  part  of  verse.  But  I  soon 
found  that  in  the  mouth  of  a  true  orator 
such  monotony  was  not  only  awkward,  but 
as  much  a  bondage  as  rhyme  itself.  I  have 


WILLIAM  BLAKE  87 

therefore  produced  a  variety  in  every  line, 
both  of  cadences  and  number  of  syllables. 
Every  word  and  every  letter  is  studied  and 
put  into  its  fit  place ;  the  terrific  numbers 
are  reserved  for  the  terrific  parts,  the  mild 
and  gentle  for  the  mild  and  gentle  parts, 
and  the  prosaic  for  inferior  parts  ;  all  are 
necessary  to  each  other.'  This  desire  for 
variety  at  the  expense  of  unity  is  illustrated 
in  one  of  Blake's  marginal  notes  to  Reynolds' 
Discourses.  '  Such  harmony  of  colouring ' 
(as  that  of  Titian  in  the  Bacchus  and 
Ariadne)  '  is  destructive  of  Art.  One 
species  of  equal  hue  over  all  is  the  cursed 
thing  called  harmony.  It  is  the  smile  of 
a  fool.'  This  is  a  carrying  to  its  extreme 
limit  of  the  principle  that  '  there  is  no  such 
thing  as  softness  in  art,  and  that  everything 
in  art  is  definite  and  minute  .  .  .  because 
vision  is  determinate  and  perfect ' ;  and  that 
'  colouring  does  not  depend  on  where  the 
colours  are  put,  but  on  where  the  lights  and 
darks  are  put,  and  all  depends  on  form  or 
outline,  on  where  that  is  put.'  The  whole 
aim  of  the  Prophetic  Books  is  to  arrive  at  a 
style  as  '  determinate  and  perfect '  as  vision, 
unmodified  by  any  of  the  deceiving  beauties 


88  WILLIAM  BLAKE 

of  nature  or  of  the  distracting  ornaments 
of  conventional  form.  What  is  further  in- 
teresting in  Blake's  statement  is  that  he 
aimed,  in  the  Prophetic  Books,  at  producing 
the  effect,  not  of  poetry  but  of  oratory,  and 
it  is  as  oratory,  the  oratory  of  the  prophets, 
that  the  reader  is  doubtless  meant  to  take 
them. 

'  Poetry  fettered,'  he  adds,  '  fetters  the 
human  race,'  and  I  doubt  not  that  he 
imagined,  as  Walt  Whitman  and  later 
vers-libristes  have  imagined,  that  in  casting 
off  the  form  he  had  unfettered  the  spirit 
of  poetry.  There  seems  never  to  have  been 
a  time  when  Blake  did  not  attempt  to  find 
for  himself  a  freer  expression  than  he 
thought  verse  could  give  him,  for  among 
the  least  mature  of  the  Poetical  Sketches 
are  poems  written  in  rhythmical  prose,  in 
imitation  partly  of  Ossian,  partly  of  the 
Bible.  An  early  MS.  called  Tiriel,  pro- 
bably of  hardly  later  date,  still  exists, 
written  in  a  kind  of  metre  of  fourteen 
syllables,  only  slightly  irregular  in  beat, 
but  rarely  fine  in  cadence.  It  already  hints, 
in  a  cloudy  way,  at  some  obscure  mythology, 
into  which  there  already  come  incoherent 


WILLIAM  BLAKE  89 

names,  of  an  Eastern  colour,  Ijim  and 
Mnetha.  Tiriel  appears  again  in  The  Book 
of  Urizen  as  Urizen's  first-born,  Thiriel, '  like 
a  man  from  a  cloud  born.'  Har  and  Heva 
reappear  in  The  Song  of  Los.  The  Book  of 
Thel,  engraved  in  1789,  the  year  of  the 
Songs  of  Innocence,  is  in  the  same  metre  of 
fourteen  syllables,  but  written  with  a  faint 
and  lovely  monotony  of  cadence,  strangely 
fluid  and  flexible  in  that  age  of  strong 
caesuras,  as  in : 

'  Come  forth,  worm  of  the  silent  valley,  to  thy  pensive 
queen.' 

The  sentiment  is  akin  to  that  of  the  Songs 
of  Innocence,  and  hardly  more  than  a 
shadow  of  the  mythology  remains.  It 
sings  or  teaches  the  holiness  and  eternity 
of  life  in  all  things,  the  equality  of  life  in 
the  flower,  the  cloud,  the  worm,  and  the 
maternal  clay  of  the  grave;  and  it  ends 
with  the  unanswered  question  of  death  to 
life:  why?  why?  In  1790  Blake  engraved 
in  two  forms,  on  six  and  ten  infinitesimal 
plates,  a  tractate  which  he  called,  There 
is  no  Natural  Religion.  They  contain,  the 
one  commenting  on  the  other,  a  clear  and 


90  WILLIAM  BLAKE 

concise  statement  of  many  of  Blake's  funda- 
mental beliefs ;  such  as  :  '  That  the  poetic 
Genius  is  the  true  Man,  and  that  the  Body 
or  outward  form  of  Man  is  derived  from  the 
Poetic  Genius.'  'As  all  men  are  alike  in 
outward  form,  so  (and  with  the  same  infinite 
variety)  all  are  alike  in  the  Poetic  Genius.' 
'  Man's  perceptions  are  not  bounded  by 
organs  of  perception,  he  perceives  more  than 
sense  (though  ever  so  acute)  can  discover.' 
Yet,  since  '  Man's  desires  are  limited  by  his 
perceptions,  none  can  desire  what  he  has  not 
perceived.'  '  Therefore  God  becomes  as  we 
are,  that  we  may  become  as  he  is.' 

In  the  same  year,  probably,  was  engraved 
The  Marriage  of  Heaven  and  Hell,  a  prose 
fantasy  full  of  splendid  masculine  thought, 
and  of  a  diabolical  or  infernal  humour,  in 
which  Blake,  with  extraordinary  boldness, 
glorifies,  parodies,  and  renounces  at  once 
the  gospel  of  his  first  master  in  mysticism, 
'  Swedenborg,  strongest  of  men,  the  Samson 
shorn  by  the  Churches,'  as  he  was  to  call 
him  long  afterwards,  in  Milton.  Blake's 
attitude  towards  Christianity  might  be 
roughly  defined  by  calling  him  a  heretic  of 
the  heresy  of  Swedenborg.  The  Marriage 


WILLIAM  BLAKE  91 

of  Heaven  and  Hell  begins :  '  As  a  new 
heaven  is  begun,  and  it  is  now  thirty- three 
years  since  its  advent,  the  Eternal  Hell 
revives.  And  lo  !  Swedenborg  is  the  Angel 
sitting  on  the  tomb :  his  writings  are  the 
linen  clothes  folded  up.'  Swedenborg  him- 
self, in  a  prophecy  that  Blake  must  have 
heard  in  his  childhood,  had  named  1757, 
the  year  of  Blake's  birth,  as  the  first  of  a 
new  dispensation,  the  dispensation  of  the 
spirit,  and  Blake's  acceptance  of  the  pro- 
phecy marks  the  date  of  his  escape  from  the 
too  close  influence  of  one  of  whom  he  said, 
as  late  as  1825,  '  Swedenborg  was  a  divine 
teacher.  Yet  he  was  wrong  in  endeavouring 
to  explain  to  the  rational  faculty  what 
reason  cannot  comprehend.'  And  so  we  are 
warned,  in  The  Marriage  of  Heaven  and 
Hell,  against  the  '  confident  insolence 
sprouting  from  systematic  reasoning.  Thus 
Swedenborg  boasts  that  what  he  writes  is 
new,  though  it  is  only  the  contents  or  index 
of  already  published  books.'  And  again : 
'  Any  man  of  mechanical  talents  may 
from  the  writings  of  Paracelsus  or  Jacob 
Behmen  produce  ten  thousand  volumes  of 
equal  value  with  Swedenborg's,  and  from 


92  WILLIAM  BLAKE 

those  of  Dante  or  Shakespeare  an  infinite 
number.  But  when  he  has  done  this,  let 
him  not  say  that  he  knows  better  than  his 
master,  for  he  only  holds  a  candle  in  sun- 
shine.' With  Paracelsus  it  is  doubtful  if 
Blake  was  ever  more  than  slightly  ac- 
quainted ;  the  influence  of  Behmen,  whom 
he  had  certainly  read  in  William  Law's 
translation  is  difficult  to  define,  and  seems 
to  have  been  of  the  most  accidental  or 
partial  kind,  but  Swedenborg  had  been  a 
sort  of  second  Bible  to  him  from  childhood, 
and  the  influence  even  of  his  '  systematic 
reasoning '  remained  with  him  as  at  least  a 
sort  of  groundwork,  or  despised  model ; 
'  foundations  for  grand  things,'  as  he  says  in 
the  Descriptive  Catalogue.  When  Sweden- 
borg says,  '  Hell  is  divided  into  societies  in 
the  same  manner  as  heaven,  and  also  into  as 
many  societies  as  heaven  ;  for  every  society 
in  heaven  has  a  society  opposite  to  it  in 
hell,  and  this  for  the  sake  of  equilibrium,' 
we  see  in  this  spirit  of  meek  order  a  matter- 
of-fact  suggestion  for  Blake's  'enormous 
wonders  of  the  abysses,'  in  which  heavens 
and  hells  change  names  and  alternate 
through  mutual  annihilations. 


WILLIAM  BLAKE  93 

The  last  note  which  Blake  wrote  on  the 
margins  of  Swedenborg's  Wisdom  of  Angels 
is  this :  { Heaven  and  Hell  are  born  to- 
gether.' The  edition  which  he  annotated  is 
that  of  1788,  and  the  marginalia,  which  are 
printed  in  Mr.  Ellis's  Real  Slake,  will  show 
how  attentive,  as  late  as  two  years  before 
the  writing  of  the  book  which  that  note 
seems  to  anticipate,  Blake  had  been  to  every 
shade  of  meaning  in  one  whom  he  was  to 
deny  with  such  bitter  mockery.  But,  even 
in  these  notes,  Blake  is  attentive  to  one 
thing  only,  he  is  reaching  after  a  confirma- 
tion of  his  own  sense  of  a  spiritual  language 
in  which  man  can  converse  with  paradise 
and  render  the  thoughts  of  angels.  He 
comments  on  nothing  else,  he  seems  to  read 
only  to  confirm  his  conviction ;  he  is  equally 
indifferent  to  Swedenborg's  theology  and  to 
his  concern  with  material  things ;  his  hells 
and  heavens,  '  uses/  and  '  spiritual  suns/ 
concern  him  only  in  so  far  as  they  help  to 
make  clearer  and  more  precise  his  notion  of 
the  powers  and  activities  of  the  spirit  in 
man.  To  Blake,  as  he  shows  us  in  Milton, 
Swedenborg's  worst  error  was  not  even  that 
of  '  systematic  reasoning/  but  that  of 


94  WILLIAM   BLAKE 

'  Showing    the    Transgressors  in  Hell :    the   proud 

Warriors  in  Heaven : 

Heaven   as   a    Punisher  and   Hell   as    one  under 
Punishment.' 

It  is  for  this  more  than  for  any  other  error 
that  Swedenborg's  'memorable  relations'  are 
tossed  back  to  him  as  '  memorable  fancies/ 
in  a  solemn  parody  of  his  own  manner  ;  that 
his  mill  and  vault  and  cave  are  taken  from 
him  and  used  against  him;  and  that  one 
once  conversant  with  his  heaven,  and  now 
weary  of  it,  '  walks  among  the  fires  of  hell, 
delighted  with  the  enjoyments  of  Genius, 
which  to  Angels  look  like  torments  and 
insanity.'  Blake  shows  us  the  energy  of 
virtue  breaking  the  Ten  Commandments, 
and  declares  :  '  Jesus  was  all  virtue,  and 
acted  from  impulse,  not  from  rules.'  Speak- 
ing through  '  the  voice  of  the  Devil,'  he 
proclaims  that  '  Energy  is  eternal  delight/ 
and  that  '  Everything  that  lives  is  holy/ 
And,  in  a  last  flaming  paradox,  still  mocking 
the  manner  of  the  analyst  of  heaven  and 
hell,  he  bids  us  :  '  Note.  This  Angel,  who  is 
now  become  a  Devil,  is  my  particular  friend : 
we  often  read  the  Bible  together,  in  its 
infernal  or  diabolical  sense,  which  the  world 


WILLIAM  BLAKE  95 

shall  have  if  they  behave  well.  I  have  also 
the  Bible  of  Hell,  which  the  world  shall 
have  whether  they  will  or  no.'  The  Bible 
of  Hell  is  no  doubt  the  Bible  of  Blake's  new 
gospel,  in  which  contraries  are  equally  true. 
We  may  piece  it  together  out  of  many 
fragments,  of  which  the  first  perhaps  is  the 
sentence  standing  by  itself  at  the  bottom  of 
the  page  :  '  One  Law  for  the  Lion  and  Ox  is 
Oppression.' 

The  Marriage  of  Heaven  and  Hell  is  loud 
with  '  the  clangour  of  the  Arrows  of  Intel- 
lect,' each  of  the  '  Proverbs  of  Hell '  is  a 
jewel  of  concentrated  wisdom,  the  whole 
book  is  Blake's  clearest  and  most  vital  state- 
ment of  his  new,  his  reawakened  belief;  it 
contains,  as  I  have  intimated,  all  Nietzsche ; 
yet  something  restless,  disturbed,  uncouth, 
has  come  violently  into  this  mind  and  art, 
wrenching  it  beyond  all  known  limits,  or 
setting  alight  in  it  an  illuminating,  devour- 
ing, and  unquenchable  flame.  In  common 
with  Swedenborg,  Blake  is  a  mystic  who 
enters  into  no  tradition,  such  as  that  tradi- 
tion of  the  Catholic  Church  which  has  a 
liturgy  awaiting  dreams.  For  Saint  John 
of  the  Cross  and  for  Saint  Teresa  the  words 


96  WILLIAM  BLAKE 

of  the  vision  are  already  there,  perfectly 
translating  ecstasy  into  familiar  speech ; 
they  have  but  to  look  and  to  speak.  But 
to  Blake,  as  to  Swedenborg,  no  tradition 
is  sufficiently  a  matter  of  literal  belief  to  be 
at  hand  with  its  forms ;  new  forms  have  to 
be  made,  and  something  of  the  crudity  of 
Swedenborg  comes  over  him  in  his  rejection 
of  the  compromise  of  mortal  imagery. 

The  Marriage  of  Heaven  and  Hell  may 
be  called  or  not  called  a  Prophetic  Book,  in 
the  strict  sense;  with  The  Visions  of  the 
Daughters  of  Albion,  engraved  at  Lambeth 
in  1793,  the  series  perhaps  more  literally 
begins.  Here  the  fine  masculine  prose  of 
The  Marriage  of  Heaven  and  Hell  has  given 
place  to  a  metre  vaguer  than  the  metre  of 
The  Book  of  Thel,  and  to  a  substance  from 
which  the  savour  has  not  yet  gone  of  the 
Songs  of  Innocence,  in  such  lines  as  : 

'  The  new  washed  lamb  tinged  with  the  village  smoke, 

and  the  bright  swan 
By  the  red  earth  of  our  immortal  river.' 

It  is  Blake's  book  of  love,  and  it  defends  the 
honesty  of  the  natural  passions  with  un- 
slackening  ardour.  There  is  no  mythology 


WILLIAM   BLAKE  97 

in  it,  beyond  a  name  or  two,  easily  explicable. 
Oothoon,  the  virgin  joy,  oppressed  by  laws 
and  cruelties  of  restraint  and  jealousy,  vindi- 
cates her  right  to  the  freedom  of  innocence 
and  to  the  instincts  of  infancy. 

'  And  trees  and  birds  and  beasts  and  men  behold  their 

eternal  joy. 
Arise,  you  little  glancing  wings,  and  sing  your  infant 

joy: 
Arise,  and  drink  your  bliss,  for  everything  that  lives 

is  holy  ! ' 

It  is  the  gospel  of  The  Marriage  of  Heaven 
and  Hell,  and,  as  that  proclaimed  liberty  for 
the  mind,  so  this,  with  abundant  rhetoric, 
but  with  vehement  conviction,  proclaims 
liberty  for  the  body.  In  form  it  is  still  clear, 
its  eloquence  and  imagery  are  partly  biblical, 
and  have  little  suggestion  of  the  manner  of 
the  later  Prophetic  Books. 

America,  written  in  the  same  year,  in  the 
same  measure  as  the  Visions  of  the  Daughters 
of  Albion,  is  the  most  vehement,  wild,  and 
whirling  of  all  Blake's  prophecies.  It  ia  a 
prophecy  of  revolution,  and  it  takes  the 
revolt  of  America  against  England  both 
literally  and  symbolically,  with  names  of 
'  Washington,  Franklin,  Paine  and  Warren, 


98  WILLIAM   BLAKE 

Gates,  Hancock  and  Green,'  side  by  side  with 
Ore  and  the  Angel  of  Albion ;  it  preaches 
every  form  of  bodily  and  spiritual  liberty  in 
the  terms  of  contemporary  events,  Boston's 
Angel,  London's  Guardian,  and  the  like,  in 
the  midst  of  cataclysms  of  all  nature,  fires 
and  thunders  temporal  and  eternal.  The 
world  for  a  time  is  given  into  the  power  of 
Ore,  unrestrained  desire,  which  is  to  bring 
freedom  through  revolution  and  the  destroy- 
ing of  the  bonds  of  good  and  evil.  He  is 
called  'Antichrist,  Hater  of  Dignities,  lover 
of  wild  rebellion,  and  transgressor  of  God's 
Law.'  He  is  the  Satan  of  The  Marriage  of 
Heaven  and  Hell,  and  he  also  proclaims  : 

'  For  everything  that  lives  is  holy,  life  delights  in 

life; 

Because  the  soul   of    sweet  delight  can  never  be 
defil'd.' 

As,  in  that  book,  Blake  had  seen  '  the  fiery 
limbs,  the  flaming  hair '  of  the  son  of  fire 
'  spurning  the  clouds  written  with  curses, 
stamping  the  stony  law  to  dust ' ;  so,  here, 
he  hears  the  voice  of  Ore  proclaiming  : 

'  The  fierce  joy,  that  Urizen  perverted  to  ten  commands, 
What  night  he  led  the  starry  hosts  through  the  wild 
wilderness : 


WILLIAM  BLAKE  99 

That  stony  law  I  stamp  to  dust :  and  scatter  religion 

abroad 
To  the  four  winds  as  a  torn  book,  and  none  shall 

gather  the  leaves.' 

Liberty  comes  in  like  a  flood  bursting  all 
barriers  : 

'  The  doors  of  marriage  are  open,  and  the  Priests  in 

rustling  scales 
Rush  into  reptile  coverts,  hiding  from  the  fires  of 

Ore, 
That  play  around  the  golden  roofs  in  wreaths  of  fierce 

desire, 
Leaving  the  females  naked  and  glowing  with  the  lusts 

of  youth. 
For  the  female  spirits  of  the  dead  pining  in  bonds  of 

religion 
Run  from  their  fetters  reddening,  and  in  long-drawn 

arches  sitting, 
They  feel  the  nerves  of  youth  renew,  and  desires  of 

ancient  times, 
Over  their  pale  limbs  as  a  vine  when  the  tender  grape 

appears.' 


The  world,  in  this  regeneration  through 
revolution  (which  seemed  to  Blake,  no  doubt, 
a  thing  close  at  hand,  in  those  days  when 
France  and  America  seemed  to  be  breaking 
down  the  old  tyrannies),  is  to  be  no  longer 


100  WILLIAM  BLAKE 

a  world  laid  out  by  convention  for  the  un- 
trustworthy ;  and  he  asks  : 

1  Who  commanded  this  1  what  God  ?  what  Angel  ? 

To  keep  the  generous  from  experience  till  the  un- 
generous 

Are    unrestrained    performers    of   the    energies    of 
nature, 

Till  pity  is  become  a  trade,  and  generosity  a  science 

That  men  get  rich  by.' 

For  twelve  years,  from  the  American  to  the 
French  revolution,  '  Angels  and  weak  men ' 
are  to  govern  the  strong,  and  then  Europe 
is  to  be  overwhelmed  by  the  fire  that  had 
broken  out  in  the  West,  though  the  ancient 
guardians  of  the  five  senses  '  slow  advance 
to  shut  the  five  gates  of  their  law-built 
houses.' 

'But  the  gates  were  consumed,  and  their  bolts  and 

hinges  melted, 

And  the  fierce  flames  burnt  round  the  heavens,  and 
round  the  abode  of  men.' 

Here  the  myth,  though  it  is  present 
throughout,  is  an  undercurrent,  and  the 
crying  of  the  message  is  what  is  chiefly 
heard.  In  Europe  (1794),  which  is  written 
in  lines  broken  up  into  frequent  but  not 


WILLIAM  BLAKE  101 

very  significant  irregularities,  short  lines 
alternating  with  long  ones,  in  the  manner 
of  an  irregular  ode,  the  mythology  is  like 
a  net  or  spider's  web  over  the  whole  text. 
Names  not  used  elsewhere,  or  not  in  the 
same  form,  are  found :  Manatha-Varcyon, 
Thiralatha,  who  in  Europe  is  Diralada.  The 
whole  poem  is  an  allegory  of  the  sleep  of 
Nature  during  the  eighteen  hundred  years 
of  the  Christian  era,  under  bonds  of  narrow 
religions  and  barren  moralities  and  tyrannous 
laws,  and  of  the  awakening  to  forgotten  joy, 
when  '  Nature  felt  through  all  her  pores  the 
enormous  revelry,'  and  the  fiery  spirit  of 
Ore,  beholding  the  morning  in  the  east,  shot 
to  the  earth, 

'  And  in  the  vineyards  of  red  France  appear'd  the  light 
of  his  fury.' 

It  is  another  hymn  of  revolution,  but  this 
time  an  awakening  more  wholly  mental, 
with  only  occasional  contemporary  allusions 
like  that  of  the  judge  in  Westminster  whose 
wig  grows  to  his  scalp,  and  who  is  seen 
'  grovelling  along  Great  George  Street 
through  the  Park  gate.'  'Howlings  and 
hissings,  shrieks  and  groans,  and  voices  of 


102  WILLIAM  BLAKE 

despair,'  are  heard  throughout ;  we  see 
thought  change  the  infinite  to  a  serpent : 

1  Then  was  the  serpent  temple  formed,  image  of  infinite 
Shut  up  in  finite  revolutions,   and  man  become  an 

angel ; 
Heaven  a  mighty  circle  turning;  God  a  tyrant  crown'd.' 

The  serpent  temple  shadows  the  whole 
island  : 

'  Enitharmon  laugh'd  in  her  sleep  to  see  (0  woman's 

triumph) 
Every  house  a  den,  every  man  bound :  the  shadows 

are  filled 
With  spectres,  and  the  windows  wove  over  with  curses 

of  iron : 
Over  the  doors  Thou  shalt  not :  and  over  the  chimneys 

Fear  is  written : 
With  bands  of  iron  round  their  necks  fasten'd  into  the 

walls 
The  citizens :   in   leaden   gyves   the   inhabitants   of 

suburbs 
Walk  heavy :  soft  and  bent  are  the  bones  of  villagers.' 

The  whole  book  is  a  lament  and  protest,  and 
it  ends  with  a  call  to  spiritual  battle.  In  a 
gay  and  naive  prologue,  written  by  Blake 
in  a  copy  of  Europe  in  the  possession  of  Mr. 
Linnell,  and  quoted  by  Ellis  and  Yeats, 
Blake  tells  us  that  he  caught  a  fairy  on  a 
streaked  tulip,  and  brought  him  home  : 


WILLIAM  BLAKE  103 

'As  we  went  along 
Wild  flowers  I  gathered,  and  he  show'd  me  each  eternal 

flower. 
He  laughed  aloud  to  see  them  whimper  because  they 

were  pluck'd, 
Then  hover'd  round  me  like  a  cloud  of  incense.  When 

I  came 
Into  my  parlour  and  sat  down  and  took  my  pen  to 

write, 
My  fairy  sat  upon  the  table  and  dictated  Europe.' 

The  First  Book  of  Urizen  (1794)  is  a  myth, 
shadowed  in  dark  symbols,  of  the  creation 
of  mortal  life  and  its  severing  from  eternity  ; 
the  birth  of  Time  out  of  the  void  and  '  self- 
contemplating  shadow '  of  unimaginative 
Reason ;  the  creation  of  the  senses,  each  a 
limiting  of  eternity,  and  the  closing  of  the 
tent  of  heavenly  knowledge,  so  that  Time 
and  the  creatures  of  Time  behold  eternity 
no  more.  We  see  the  birth  of  Pity  and  of 
Desire,  woman  the  shadow  and  desire  the 
child  of  man.  Reason  despairs  as  it  realises 
that  life  lives  upon  death,  and  the  cold  pity 
of  its  despair  forms  into  a  chill  shadow,  which 
follows  it  like  a  spider's  web,  and  freezes  into 
the  net  of  religion,  or  the  restraint  of  the 
activities.  Under  this  net  the  senses  shrink 
inwards,  and  that  creation  which  is  'the 


104  WILLIAM  BLAKE 

body  of  our  death '  and  our  stationing  in 
time  and  space  is  finished  : 

'  Six  days  they  shrank  up  from  existence, 
And  on  the  seventh  they  rested 
And  they  bless'd  the  seventh  day,  in  sick  hope, 
And  forgot  their  eternal  life.' 

Then  the  children  of  reason,  now  '  sons  and 
daughters  of  sorrow,' 

'  Wept  and  built 

Tombs  in  the  desolate  places, 

And  form'd  laws  of  prudence  and  call'd  them 

The  eternal  laws  of  God.' 

But  Fuzon,  the  spirit  of  fire,  forsook  the 
'pendulous  earth'  with  those  children  of 
Urizen  who  would  still  follow  him. 

Here,  crystallised  in  the  form  of  a  myth, 
we  see  many  of  Blake's  fundamental  ideas. 
Some  of  them  we  have  seen  under  other 
forms,  as  statement  rather  than  as  image, 
in  The  Marriage  of  Heaven  and  Hell  and 
There  is  no  Natural  Religion.  We  shall  see 
them  again,  developed,  elaborated,  branch- 
ing out  into  infinite  side-issues,  multiplying 
upon  themselves,  in  the  later  Prophetic 
Books,  partly  as  myth,  partly  as  statement ; 
we  shall  see  them  in  many  of  the  lyrical 
poems,  transformed  into  song,  but  still  never 


WILLIAM  BLAKE  105 

varying  in  their  message ;  and  we  shall  see 
them,  in  the  polemical  prose  of  all  the  re- 
maining fragments,  and  in  the  private  letters, 
and  in  the  annotations  of  Swedenborg,  and 
in  Crabb  Robinson's  records  of  conversa- 
tions. The  Book  of  Urizen  is  a  sort  of 
nucleus,  the  germ  of  a  system. 

Next  to  the  Boole  of  Urizen,  if  we  may 
judge  from  the  manner  of  its  engraving, 
came  The  Song  of  Los  (1795),  written  in  a 
manner  of  vivid  declamation,  the  lines  now 
lengthening,  now  shrinking,  without  fixed 
beat  or  measure.  It  is  the  song  of  Time, 
'  the  Eternal  Prophet,'  and  tells  the  course 
of  inspiration  as  it  passes  from  east  to  west, 
'  abstract  philosophy '  in  Brahma,  '  forms  of 
dark  delusion'  to  Moses  on  Mount  Sinai, 
the  mount  of  law ;  '  a  gospel  from  wretched 
Theotormon '  (distressed  human  love  and 
pity)  to  Jesus,  '  a  man  of  sorrows ' ;  the 
'  loose  Bible '  of  Mahomet,  setting  free  the 
senses  ;  Odin's  '  code  of  war.' 

'  These  were  the  Churches,  Hospitals,  Castles,  Palaces, 
Like  nets  and  gins  and  traps  to  catch  the  joys  of 

Eternity, 

And  all  the  rest  a  desart : 
Till  like  a  dream  Eternity  was  obliterated  and  erased/ 


106  WILLIAM   BLAKE 

'  The  vast  of  Nature '  shrinks  up  before  the 
'  shrunken  eyes '  of  men,  till  it  is  finally 
enclosed  in  the  '  philosophy  of  the  five 
senses,'  the  philosophy  of  Newton  and 
Locke.  '  The  Kings  of  Asia/  the  cruelties 
of  the  heathen,  the  ancient  powers  of  evil, 
call  on  '  famine  from  the  heath,  pestilence 
from  the  fen,' 

'  To  turn  man  from  his  path, 
To  restrain  the  child  from  the  womb, 
To  cut  off  the  bread  from  the  city, 
That  the  remnant  may  learn  to  obey, 
That  the  pride  of  the  heart  may  fail, 
That  the  lust  of  the  eyes  may  be  quench'd, 
That  the  delicate  ear  in  its  infancy 
May  be  dull'd,  and  the  nostrils  clos'd  up : 
To  teach  mortal  worms  the  path 
That  leads  from  the  gates  of  the  grave.' 

But,  in  the  darkness  of  their  '  ancient  woven 
dens,'  they  are  startled  by  '  the  thick- 
flaming,  thought-creating  fires  of  Ore ' ;  and 
at  their  cry  Urizen  comes  forth  to  meet  and 
challenge  the  liberating  spirit ;  he  thunders 
against  the  pillar  of  fire  that  rises  out  of 
the  darkness  of  Europe ;  and  at  the  clash 
of  their  mutual  onset  '  the  Grave  shrieks 
aloud.'  But  'Urizen  wept,'  the  cold  pity 
of  reason  which,  as  we  have  seen  in  the 


WILLIAM  BLAKE  107 

book  named  after  him,  freezes  into  nets  of 
religion,  '  twisted  like  to  the  human  brain.' 

The  Book  of  Los  (also  dated  1795)  is 
written  in  the  short  lines  of  Urizen  and 
Ahania,  a  metre  following  a  fixed,  insistent 
beat,  as  of  Los's  hammer  on  his  anvil.  It  be- 
gins with  the  lament  of '  Eno,  aged  Mother,' 
over  the  liberty  of  old  times  : 

1 0  Times  remote  ! 

When  Love  and  Joy  were  adoration, 
And  none  impure  were  deem'd. 
Not  Eyeless  Covet, 
Nor  Thin-lip'd  Envy, 
Nor  Bristled  Wrath, 
Nor  Curled  Wantonness  ' ; 

none  of  these,  that  is,  yet  turned  to  evil, 
but  still  unfallen  energies.  At  this,  flames 
of  desire  break  out,  '  living,  intelligent,'  and 
Los,  the  spirit  of  Inspiration,  divides  the 
flames,  freezes  them  into  solid  darkness,  and 
is  imprisoned  by  them,  and  escapes,  only  in 
terror,  and  falls  through  ages  into  the  void 
('  Truth  has  bounds,  Error  none '),  until  he 
has  organised  the  void  and  brought  into  it 
a  light  which  makes  visible  the  form  of  the 
void.  He  sees  it  as  the  backbone  of  Urizen, 
the  bony  outlines  of  reason,  and  then  begins, 


108  WILLIAM  BLAKE 

for  the  first  time  in  the  Prophetic  Books, 
that  building  of  furnaces,  and  wielding  of 
hammer  and  anvil  of  which  we  are  to  hear 
so  much  in  Jerusalem.  He  forges  the  sun, 
and  chains  cold  intellect  to  vital  heat,  from 
whose  torments 

'  a  twin 

Was  completed,  a  Human  Illusion 
In  darkness  and  deep  clouds  involved.' 

In  The  Book  of  Los  almost  all  relationship 
to  poetry  has  vanished  ;  the  myth  is  cloudier 
and  more  abstract.  Scarcely  less  so  is  The 
Book  oj  Ahania  (1795),  written  in  the  same 
short  lines,  but  in  a  manner  occasionally  more 
concrete  and  realisable.  Like  Urizen,  it  is 
almost  all  myth.  It  follows  Fuzon,  '  son  of 
Urizen's  silent  burnings/  in  his  fiery  revolt 
against 

'  This  cloudy  God  seated  on  waters, 
Now  seen,  now  obscured,  king  of  Sorrows.' 

From  the  stricken  and  divided  Urizen  is 
born  Ahania  ('so  name  his  parted  soul'), 
who  is  '  his  invisible  lust/  whom  he  loves, 
hides,  and  calls  Sin. 

'  She  fell  down,  a  faint  shadow  wandering, 
In  chaos,  and  circling  dark  Urizen, 


WILLIAM  BLAKE  109 

As  the  moon  anguished  circles  the  earth, 
Hopeless,  abhorred,  a  death  shadow, 
Unseen,  unbodied,  unknown, 
The  mother  of  Pestilence.' 

But  Urizen,  recovering  his  strength,  seizes 
the  bright  son  of  fire,  his  energy  or  passion, 
and  nails  him  to  the  dark  '  religious '  '  Tree 
of  Mystery,'  from  under  whose  shade  comes 
the  voice  of  Ahania,  '  weeping  upon  the 
void/  lamenting  her  lost  joys  of  love,  and 
the  days  when 

'  Swelled  with  ripeness  and  fat  with  fatness, 
Bursting  on  winds  my  odours, 
My  ripe  figs  and  rich  pomegranates, 
In  infant  joy  at  my  feet, 
0  Urizen,  sported  and  sang.' 

In  The  Four  Zoas  Ahania  is  called  '  the 
feminine  indolent  bliss,  the  indulgent  self  of 
weariness.'  '  One  final  glimpse,'  says  Mr. 
Swinburne,  '  we  may  take  of  Ahania  after 
her  division — the  love  of  God,  as  it  were, 
parted  from  God,  impotent  therefore  and 
a  shadow,  if  not  rather  a  plague  and  blight ; 
mercy  severed  from  justice,  and  thus  made 
a  worse  thing  than  useless.'  And  her 
lament  ends  in  this  despair  : 


110  WILLIAM  BLAKE 

'  But  now  alone  over  rocks,  mountains, 
Cast  out  from  thy  lovely  bosom 
Cruel  jealousy,  selfish  fear, 
Self-destroying ;  how  can  delight 
Renew  in  these  chains  of  darkness 
Where  bones  of  beasts  are  strown 
On  the  bleak  and  snowy  mountains, 
Where  bones  from  the  birth  are  buried 
Before  they  see  the  light.' 

The  mythology,  of  which  parts  are  de- 
veloped in  each  of  these  books,  is  thrown 
together,  in  something  more  approaching  a 
whole,  but  without  apparent  cohesion  or 
consistency,  in  The  Four  Zoas,  which  pro- 
bably dates  from  1797  and  which  exists  in 
seventy  sheets  of  manuscript,  of  uncertain 
order,  almost  certainly  in  an  unfinished 
state,  perhaps  never  intended  for  publica- 
tion, but  rather  as  a  storehouse  of  ideas. 
This  manuscript,  much  altered,  arranged 
in  a  conjectural  order,  and  printed  with 
extreme  incorrectness,  was  published  by 
Messrs.  Ellis  and  Yeats  in  the  third  volume 
of  their  book  on  Blake,  under  the  first,  re- 
jected, title  of  Vala.1  They  describe  it  as 
being  in  itself  a  sort  of  compound  of  all 

1  The  text  of  Vala,  with  corrections  and  additional  errors, 
is  now  accessible  in  the  second  volume  of  Mr.  Ellis'  edition  of 
Blake's  Poetical  Works. 


WILLIAM   BLAKE  111 

Blake's  other  books,  except  Milton  and 
Jerusalem,  which  are  enriched  by  scraps 
taken  from  Vala,  but  are  not  summarised  in 
it.  In  the  uncertain  state  in  which  we  have 
it,  it  is  impossible  to  take  it  as  a  wholly 
authentic  text ;  but  it  is  both  full  of 
incidental  beauty  and  of  considerable  assist- 
ance in  unravelling  many  of  the  mysteries 
in  Milton  and  Jerusalem,  the  books  written 
at  Felpham,  both  dated  1804,  in  which 
we  find  the  final  development  of  the  myth, 
or  as  much  of  that  final  development  as  has 
come  to  us  in  the  absence  of  the  manuscripts 
destroyed  or  disposed  of  by  Tatham.  Those 
two  books  indeed  seem  to  presuppose  in 
their  readers  an  acquaintance  with  many 
matters  told  or  explained  in  this,  from 
which  passages  are  taken  bodily,  but  with 
little  apparent  method.  As  it  stands,  Vala 
is  much  more  of  a  poem  than  either  Milton 
or  Jerusalem  ;  the  cipher  comes  in  at  times, 
but  between  there  are  broad  spaces  of  cloudy 
but  not  wholly  unlighted  imagery.  Blake 
still  remembers  that  he  is  writing  a  poem, 
earthly  beauty  is  still  divine  beauty  to  him, 
and  the  message  is  not  yet  so  stringent  as 
to  forbid  all  lingering  by  the  way. 


112  WILLIAM  BLAKE 

In  some  parts  of  the  poem  the  manner  is 
frankly  biblical,  and  suggests  the  book  of 
Proverbs,  as  thus : 

'  What  is  the  price  of  experience  1    Do  men  buy  it  for 

a  song, 
Or  wisdom  for  a  dance  in  the  street  1    No,  it  is  bought 

with  the  price 
Of    all  that  a  man  hath — his  wife,   his  house,  his 

children. 
Wisdom  is  sold  in  the  desolate  market  where  none 

comes  to  buy, 
And  in  the  withered  fields  where  the  farmer  ploughs 

for  bread  in  vain.' 

Nature  is  still  an  image  accepted  as  an 
adequate  symbol,  and  we  get  reminiscences 
here  and  there  of  the  simpler,  early  work  of 
Thel,  for  instance,  in  such  lines  as  : 

'  And  as  the  little  seed  waits  eagerly  watching  for  its 

flower  and  fruit, 
Anxious  its    little  soul    looks    out  into  the    clear 

expanse 
To  see  if  hungry  winds  are  abroad  with  their  invisible 

array ; 
So  man  looks  out  in  tree  and  herb,  and  fish  and  bird 

and  beast, 
Collecting  up  the  scattered  portions  of  his  immortal 

body 
Into  the  elemental  forms  of  everything  that  grows.' 


WILLIAM  BLAKE  113 

There  are  descriptions  of  feasts,  of  flames,  of 
last  judgments,  of  the  new  Eden,  which  are 
full  of  colour  and  splendour,  passing  without 
warning  into  the  '  material  sublime '  of 
Fuseli,  as  in  the  picture  of  Urizen  '  stonied 
upon  his  throne '  in  the  eighth  '  Night.'  In 
the  passages  which  we  possess  in  the  earlier 
and  later  version  we  see  the  myth  of  Blake 
gradually  crystallising,  the  transposition  of 
every  intelligible  symbol  into  the  secret 
cipher.  Thus  we  find  '  Mount  Gilead ' 
changed  into  'Mount  Snowdon,'  'Beth  Peor' 
into  '  Cos  way  Vale,'  and  a  plain  image  such 
as  this  : 

'  The  Mountain  called  out  to  the  Mountain,  Awake, 
oh  brother  Mountain,' 

is  translated  backwards  into  : 

'  Ephraim  called  out  to  Tiriel,  Awake,  oh  brother 
Mountain.' 

Images  everywhere  are  seen  freezing  into 
types ;  they  stop  half-way,  and  have  not 
yet  abandoned  the  obscure  poetry  of  the 
earlier  Prophetic  Books  for  the  harder 
algebra  of  Milton  and  Jerusalem. 


H 


114  WILLIAM  BLAKE 


VI 

THE  first  statement  by  Blake  of  his  aims 
and  principles  in  art  is  to  be  found  in  some 
letters  to  George  Cumberland  and  to  Dr. 
Trusler,  contained  in  the  Cumberland  Papers 
in  the  British  Museum.  These  letters  were 
first  printed  by  Dr.  Garnett  in  the  Hamp- 
stead  Annual  of  1903,  but  with  many  mis- 
takes and  omissions.1  I  have  recopied  from 
the  originals  the  text  of  such  letters  as  I 
quote.  It  appears  that  in  the  year  1799 
Blake  undertook,  at  the  suggestion  of  Cum- 
berland, to  do  some  drawings  for  a  book  by 
Dr.  Trusler,  a  sort  of  quack  writer  and 
publisher,  who  may  be  perhaps  sufficiently 
defined  by  the  quotation  of  the  title  of  one 
of  his  books,  which  is  The  Way  to  be  Rich 
and  Respectable.  On  August  16,  Blake 
writes  to  say  :  '  I  find  more  and  more  that 
my  Style  of  Designing  is  a  Species  by 
itself,  and  in  this  which  I  send  you  have 

1  They  are  now  to  be  read  in  Mr.  Russell's  edition  of  The 
Letters  of  William  Blake. 


WILLIAM  BLAKE  115 

been  compelled  by  my  Genius  or  Angel  to 
follow  where  he  led  ;  if  I  were  to  act  other- 
wise  it   would   not   fulfil   the   purpose    for 
which  alone  I  live,  which  is  in  conjunction 
with  such  men  as  my  friend  Cumberland  to 
renew  the  lost  Art  of  the  Greeks.'    He  tells 
him  that  he  has  attempted  to   '  follow  his 
Dictate '  every  morning  for  a  fortnight,  but 
'  it    was    out    of    my    power ! '     He    then 
describes  what  he  has  done,  and  says  :  '  If 
you  approve  of  my  manner,  and  it  is  agree- 
able to  you,  I  would  rather  Paint  Pictures 
in  oil  of  the  same  dimensions  than  make 
Drawings,  and  on  the  same  terms.     By  this 
means  you  will  have  a  number  of  Cabinet 
pictures,  which  I  flatter  myself  will  not  be 
unworthy   of  a   Scholar   of  Rembrant   and 
Teniers,  whom  I  have  Studied  no  less  than 
Rafael  and  Michaelangelo.'     The  next  letter, 
which  I  will  give  in  full,  for  it  is  a  docu- 
ment of  great  importance,  is  dated  a  week 
later,  and  the  nature  of  the  reply  which  it 
answers  can  be  gathered  from  Blake's  com- 
ment on  the  matter  to  Cumberland,  three 
days  later  still.     '  I  have  made  him,'  he  says, 
'  a   Drawing  in   my  best   manner :    he   has 
sent  it  back  with  a  Letter  full  of  Criticisms, 


116  WILLIAM  BLAKE 

in  which  he  says  It  accords  not  with  his 
Intentions,  which  are,  to  Reject  all  Fancy 
from  his  Work.  How  far  he  expects  to 
please,  I  cannot  tell.  But  as  I  cannot  paint 
Dirty  rags  and  old  Shoes  where  I  ought  to 
place  Naked  Beauty  or  simple  ornament,  I 
despair  of  ever  pleasing  one  Class  of  Men.' 
'  I  could  not  help  smiling,'  he  says  later, 
'  at  the  difference  between  the  doctrines  of 
Dr.  Trusler  and  those  of  Christ. '  Here,  then, 
is  the  letter  in  which  Blake  accounts  for 
himself  to  the  quack  doctor  (who  has 
docketed  it :  '  Blake,  Dimd  with  super- 
stition '),  as  if  to  posterity  : — 

EEVD.  SIR, 

I  really  ain  sorry  that  you  are  falln  out  with 
the  Spiritual  World,  Especially  if  I  should  have 
to  answer  for  it.  I  feel  very  sorry  that  your 
Ideas  and  Mine  on  Moral  Painting  differ  so 
much  as  to  have  made  you  angry  with  my  method 
of  study.  If  I  am  wrong  I  am  wrong  in  good 
company.  I  had  hoped  your  plan  comprehended 
All  Species  of  this  Art,  and  Especially  that  you 
would  not  regret  that  Species  which  gives  Exist- 
ence to  Every  other,  namely,  Visions  of  Eternity. 
You  say  that  I  want  somebody  to  Elucidate  my 
Ideas.  But  you  ought  to  know  that  what  is 


WILLIAM   BLAKE  117 

Grand  is  necessarily  obscure  to  Weak  men.  That 
which  can  be  made  Explicit  to  the  Ideot  is  not 
worth  my  care.  The  wisest  of  the  Ancients 
considerd  what  is  not  too  Explicit  as  the  fittest 
for  Instruction,  because  it  rouzes  the  faculties  to 
act.  I  name  Moses,  Solomon,  Esop,  Homer,  Plato. 

But  as  you  have  favord  me  with  your  remarks 
on  my  Design,  permit  me  in  return  to  defend  it 
against  a  mistaken  one,  which  is,  That  I  have 
supposed  Malevolence  without  a  Cause.  Is  not 
Merit  in  one  a  Cause  of  Envy  in  another,  and 
Serenity  and  Happiness  and  Beauty  a  Cause  of 
Malevolence  ?  But  Want  of  Money  and  the  Dis- 
tress of  a  Thief  can  never  be  alledged  as  the  Cause 
of  his  Thievery,  for  many  honest  people  endure 
greater  hardships  with  Fortitude.  We  must  there- 
fore seek  the  Cause  elsewhere  than  in  the  want  of 
Money,  for  that  is  the  Miser's  passion,  not  the  Thief's. 

I  have  therefore  proved  your  Reasonings  111  pro- 
portiond,  which  you  can  never  prove  my  figures  to 
be.  They  are  those  of  Michael  Angelo,  Eafael  and 
the  Antique,  and  of  the  best  living  Models.  I 
perceive  that  your  Eye  is  perverted  by  Caricature 
Prints,  which  ought  not  to  abound  so  much  as  they 
do.  Fun  I  love,  but  too  much  Fun  is  of  all  things 
the  most  loathsome.  Mirth  is  better  than  Fun,  and 
Happiness  is  better  than  Mirth.  I  feel  that  a  Man 
may  be  happy  in  This  World,  and  I  know  that 
This  World  is  a  World  of  Imagination  and  Vision. 
I  see  Everything  I  paint  In  This  World :  but 


118  WILLIAM  BLAKE 

Every  body  does  not  see  alike.  To  the  Eyes  of  a 
Miser  a  Guinea  is  more  beautiful  than  the  Sun,  and 
a  bag  worn  with  the  use  of  Money  has  more  beauti- 
ful proportions  than  a  Vine  filled  with  Grapes. 
The  tree  which  moves  some  to  tears  of  joy  is  in 
the  Eyes  of  others  only  a  Green  thing  that  stands 
in  the  way.  Some  see  Nature  all  Ridicule  and 
Deformity,  and  by  these  I  shall  not  regulate  my 
proportions ;  and  some  scarce  see  Nature  at  all. 
But  to  the  Eyes  of  the  Man  of  Imagination,  Nature 
is  Imagination  itself.  As  a  Man  is,  so  he  sees. 
As  the  Eye  is  formed,  such  are  its  Powers.  You 
certainly  Mistake  when  you  say  that  the  Visions 
of  Fancy  are  not  to  be  found  in  This  World.  To 
Me  This  World  is  all  One  continued  Vision  of 
Fancy  or  Imagination,  and  I  feel  Flattered  when  I 
am  told  so.  What  is  it  sets  Homer,  Virgil,  and 
Milton  in  so  high  a  rank  of  Art  ?  Why  is  the 
Bible  more  Entertaining  and  Instructive  than  any 
other  book  ?  Is  it  not  because  they  are  addressed 
to  the  Imagination,  which  is  Spiritual  Sensation, 
and  but  mediately  to  the  Understanding  or  Reason  ? 
Such  is  True  Painting,  and  such  was  alone  valued 
by  the  Greeks  and  the  best  modern  Artists.  Con- 
sider what  Lord  Bacon  says — 'Sense  sends  over 
to  Imagination  before  Reason  have  judged,  and 
Reason  sends  over  to  Imagination  before  the 
Decree  can  be  acted.'  See  Advancement  of  Learn- 
ing, Part  2,  P.  47,  of  first  Edition. 

But  I  am  happy  to  find  a  Great  Majority  of 


WILLIAM   BLAKE  119 

Fellow  Mortals  who  can  Elucidate  My  Visions,  and 
Particularly  they  have  been  Elucidated  by  Children, 
who  have  taken  a  greater  delight  in  contemplating 
my  Pictures  than  I  even  hoped.  Neither  Youth 
nor  Childhood  is  Folly  or  Incapacity.  Some 
Children  are  Fools,  and  so  are  some  old  Men.  But 
There  is  a  vast  Majority  on  the  side  of  Imagination 
or  Spiritual  Sensation. 

To  Engrave  after  another  Painter  is  infinitely 
more  laborious  than  to  Engrave  one's  own  Inven- 
tions. And  of  the  size  you  require  my  price  has 
been  Thirty  Guineas,  and  I  cannot  afford  to  do  it 
for  less.  I  had  Twelve  for  the  Head  I  sent  you  as 
a  Specimen ;  but  after  my  own  designs  I  could  do 
at  least  Six  times  the  quantity  of  labour  in  the 
same  time,  which  will  account  for  the  difference  in 
price,  as  also  that  Chalk  Engraving  is  at  least  Six 
times  as  laborious  as  Aqua  tinta.  I  have  no 
objection  to  Engraving  after  another  Artist.  En- 
graving is  the  profession  I  was  apprenticed  to,  and 
I  should  never  have  attempted  to  live  by  any  thing 
else  If  orders  had  not  come  in  for  my  Designs  and 
Paintings,  which  I  have  the  pleasure  to  tell  you  are 
Increasing  Every  Day.  Thus  If  I  am  a  Painter  it 
is  not  to  be  attributed  to  Seeking  after.  But  I  am 
contented  whether  I  live  by  Painting  or  Engraving. 

I  am,  Eevd.  Sir,  your  very  obedient  Servant, 

WILLIAM  BLAKE. 

13  HERCULES  BUILDINGS,  LAMBETH, 
August  23,  1799. 


120  WILLIAM  BLAKE 

Blake  tells  Cumberland  the  whole  story 
quite  cheerfully,  and  ends  with  these  signi- 
ficant words,  full  of  patience,  courtesy,  and 
sad  humour  :  '  As  to  Myself,  about  whom 
you  are  so  kindly  Interested,  I  live  by 
Miracle.  I  am  Painting  small  Pictures  from 
the  Bible.  For  as  to  Engraving,  in  which 
art  I  cannot  reproach  myself  with  any 
neglect,  yet  I  am  laid  by  in  a  corner  as  if 
I  did  not  exist,  and  since  my  Young's  Night 
Thoughts  have  been  published,  even  Johnson 
and  Fuseli  have  discarded  my  Graver.  But 
as  I  know  that  He  who  works  and  has  his 
health  cannot  starve,  I  laugh  at  Fortune 
and  Go  on  and  on.  I  think  I  foresee  better 
Things  than  I  have  ever  seen.  My  Work 
pleases  my  employer,  and  I  have  an  order 
for  Fifty  small  Pictures  at  One  Guinea  each, 
which  is  something  better  than  mere  copy- 
ing after  another  artist.  But  above  all  I 
feel  myself  happy  and  contented,  let  what 
will  come.  Having  passed  now  near  twenty 
years  in  ups  and  downs,  I  am  used  to  them, 
and  perhaps  a  little  practice  in  them  may 
turn  out  to  benefit.  It  is  now  exactly 
Twenty  years  since  I  was  upon  the  ocean 
of  business,  and  tho  I  laugh  at  Fortune, 


WILLIAM  BLAKE  121 

I  am  persuaded  that  She  Alone  is  the 
Governor  of  Worldly  Riches,  and  when  it 
is  Fit  She  will  call  on  me.  Till  then  I  wait 
with  Patience,  in  hopes  that  She  is  busied 
among  my  Friends.' 

The  employer  is,  no  doubt,  Mr.  Butts,  for 
whom  Blake  had  already  begun  to  work  : 
we  know  some  of  the  '  frescoes '  and  colour- 
prints  which  belong  to  this  time ;  among 
them,  or  only  just  after,  the  incomparable 
'  Crucifixion,'  in  which  the  soldiers  cast  lots 
in  the  foreground  and  the  crosses  are  seen 
from  the  back,  against  a  stormy  sky  and 
lances  like  Tintoretto's.  But  it  was  also 
the  time  of  all  but  the  latest  Prophetic 
Books  (or  of  all  but  the  latest  of  those  left 
to  us),  and  we  may  pause  here  for  a  moment 
to  consider  some  of  the  qualities  that  Blake 
was  by  this  time  fully  displaying  in  his 
linear  and  coloured  inventions  and  '  Visions 
of  Eternity.' 

It  is  by  his  energy  and  nobility  of  crea- 
tion that  Blake  takes  rank  among  great 
artists,  in  a  place  apart  from  those  who  have 
been  content  to  study,  to  observe,  and  to 
copy.  His  invention  of  living  form  is  like 
nature's,  unintermittent,  but  without  the 


122  WILLIAM  BLAKE 

measure  and  order  of  nature,  and  without 
complete  command  over  the  material  out  of 
which  it  creates.  In  his  youth  he  had 
sought  after  prints  of  such  inventive  work 
as  especially  appealed  to  him,  Michelangelo, 
Raphael,  Diirer;  it  is  possible  that,  having 
had  '  very  early  in  life  the  ordinary  oppor- 
tunities,' as  Dr.  Malkin  puts  it,  '  of  seeing 
pictures  in  the  houses  of  noblemen  and 
gentlemen,  and  in  the  king's  palaces,'  he 
had  seen  either  pictures,  or  prints  after 
pictures,  of  the  Italian  Primitives,  whose 
attitudes  and  composition  he  at  times  sug- 
gests; and,  to  the  end,  he  worked  with 
Diirer's  '  Melancholia '  on  his  work-table  and 
Michelangelo's  designs  on  his  walls.  It 
not  unfrequently  happened  that  a  memory 
of  form  created  by  one  of  these  great 
draughtsmen  presented  itself  as  a  sort  of 
short  cut  to  the  statement  of  the  form 
which  he  was  seeing  or  creating  in  his 
own  imagination.  A  Devil's  Advocate  has 
pointed  out  '  plagiarisms '  in  Blake's  design, 
and  would  dismiss  in  consequence  his  re- 
putation for  originality.  Blake  had  not 
sufficient  mastery  of  technique  to  be  always 
wholly  original  in  design  ;  and  it  is  to  his 


WILLIAM  BLAKE  123 

dependence  on  a  technique  not  as  flexible 
as  his  imagination  was  intense  that  we  must 
attribute  what  is  unsatisfying  in  such  re- 
markable inventions  as  '  The  House  of 
Death '  (Milton's  lazar-house)  in  the  Print 
Room  of  the  British  Museum.  Its  appeal 
to  the  imagination  is  partly  in  spite  of  what 
is  '  organised  and  minutely  articulated  be- 
yond all  that  the  mortal  and  perishing 
nature  can  produce.'  Death  is  a  version 
of  the  Ancient  of  Days  and  of  Urizen,  only 
his  eyes  are  turned  to  blind  terror  and  his 
beard  to  forked  flame ;  Despair,  a  statue  of 
greenish  bronze,  is  the  Scofield  of  Jerusa- 
lem ;  the  limbs  and  faces  rigid  with  agony 
are  types  of  strength  and  symbols  of  pain. 
Yet  even  here  there  is  creation,  there  is  the 
energy  of  life,  there  is  a  spiritual  awe. 
And  wherever  Blake  works  freely,  as  in  the 
regions  of  the  Prophetic  Books,  wholly  out- 
side time  and  space,  appropriate  form  multi- 
plies under  his  creating  hand,  as  it  weaves 
a  new  creation  of  worlds  and  of  spirits, 
monstrous  and  angelical. 

Blake  distinguished,  as  all  great  imagina- 
tive artists  have  distinguished,  between 
allegory,  which  is  but  realism's  excuse  for 


124  WILLIAM   BLAKE 

existence,  and  symbol,  which  is  none  of  the 
'  daughters  of  Memory/  but  itself  vision  or 
inspiration.  He  wrote  in  the  MS.  book : 
'  Vision  or  imagination  is  a  representation 
of  what  actually  exists,  really  and  unchange- 
ably. Fable  or  allegory  is  formed  by  the 
daughters  of  Memory.'  And  thus  in  the 
designs  which  accompany  the  text  of  his 
Prophetic  Books  there  is  rarely  the  mere 
illustration  of  those  pages.  He  does  not 
copy  in  line  what  he  has  said  in  words,  or 
explain  in  words  what  he  has  rendered  in 
line ;  a  creation  probably  contemporary  is 
going  on,  and  words  and  lines  render  be- 
tween them,  the  one  to  the  eyes,  the  other 
to  the  mind,  the  same  image  of  spiritual 
things,  apprehended  by  different  organs  of 
perception. 

And  so  in  his  pictures,  what  he  gives  us 
is  not  a  picture  after  a  mental  idea;  it  is 
the  literal  delineation  of  an  imaginative 
vision,  of  a  conception  of  the  imagination. 
He  wrote  :  '  If  you  have  not  nature  before 
you  for  every  touch,  you  cannot  paint  por- 
trait ;  and  if  you  have  nature  before  you  at 
all,  you  cannot  paint  history.'  There  is  a 
water-colour  of  Christ  in  the  carpenter's 


WILLIAM   BLAKE  125 

shop  :  Christ,  a  child,  sets  to  the  floor  that 
compass  which  Blake  saw  more  often  in  the 
hands  of  God  the  Father,  stooping  out  of 
heaven  ;  his  mother  and  Joseph  stand  on 
each  side  of  him,  leaning  towards  him  with 
the  stiff  elegance  of  guardian  angels  on  a 
tomb.  That  is  how  Blake  sees  it,  and  not 
with  the  minute  detail  and  the  aim  at  local 
colour  with  which  the  Pre-Raphaelites  have 
seen  it ;  it  is  not  Holman  Hunt's  '  Bethle- 
hem '  nor  the  little  Italian  town  of  Giotto  ; 
it  is  rendered  carefully  after  the  visual 
imagination  which  the  verses  of  the  Bible 
awakened  in  his  brain.  In  one  of  those 
variations  which  he  did  on  the  '  Flight  into 
Egypt'  (the  'Biposo,'  as  he  called  it),  we 
have  a  lovely  and  surprising  invention  of 
landscape,  minute  and  impossible,  with  a 
tree  built  up  like  a  huge  vegetable,  and 
flowers  growing  out  of  the  bare  rock,  and  a 
red  and  flattened  sun  going  down  behind 
the  hills ;  Joseph  stands  under  the  tree, 
nearly  of  the  same  height,  but  grave  and 
kindly,  and  the  Mother  and  Child  are  mild 
eighteenth-century  types  of  innocence  ;  the 
browsing  donkey  has  an  engaging  rough 
homeliness  of  hide  and  aspect.  It  is  all  as 


126  WILLIAM  BLAKE 

unreal  as  you  like,  made  up  of  elements  not 
combined  into  any  faultless  pattern ;  art  has 
gone  back  further  than  Giotto,  and  is  care- 
less of  human  individuality ;  but  it  is  seen 
as  it  were  with  faith,  and  it  conveys  to  you 
precisely  what  the  painter  meant  to  convey. 
So,  in  a  lovely  water-colour  of  the  creation 
of  Eve,  this  blue-haired  doll  of  obviously 
rounded  flesh  has  in  her  something  which  is 
more  as  well  as  less  than  the  appeal  of  bodily 
beauty,  some  suggestion  to  the  imagination 
which  the  actual  technical  skill  of  Blake  has 
put  there.  With  less  delicacy  of  colour,  and 
with  drawing  in  parts  actually  misleading, 
there  is  a  strange  intensity  of  appeal,  of 
realisation  not  so  much  to  the  eyes  as 
through  them  to  the  imagination,  in  another 
water-colour  of  the  raising  of  Lazarus,  where 
the  corpse  swathed  in  grave-clothes  floats 
sidelong  upward  from  the  grave,  the  weight 
of  mortality  as  if  taken  off,  and  an  unearthly 
lightness  in  its  disemprisoned  limbs,  that 
have  forgotten  the  laws  of  mortal  gravity. 

Yet,  even  in  these  renderings  of  what  is 
certainly  not  meant  for  reality,  how  abun- 
dantly nature  comes  into  the  design  :  mere 
bright  parrot-like  birds  in  the  branches  of 


WILLIAM  BLAKE  127 

the  tree  of  knowledge  of  good  and  evil,  the 
donkey  of  the  '  Biposo,'  the  sheep's  heads 
woven  into  the  almost  decorative  border. 
Blake  was  constantly  on  his  guard  against 
the  deceits  of  nature,  the  temptation  of  a 
'facsimile  representation  of  merely  mortal 
and  perishing  substances.'  His  dread  of 
nature  was  partly  the  recoil  of  his  love  ;  he 
feared  to  be  entangled  in  the  'veils  of  Vala,' 
the  seductive  sights  of  the  world  of  the 
senses  ;  and  his  love  of  natural  things  is 
evident  on  every  page  of  even  the  latest 
of  the  Prophetic  Books.  It  is  the  natural 
world,  the  idols  of  Satan,  that  creep  in  at 
every  corner  and  border,  setting  flowers  to 
grow,  and  birds  to  fly,  and  snakes  to  glide 
harmlessly  around  the  edges  of  these  hard 
and  impenetrable  pages.  The  minute  life 
of  this  '  vegetable  world '  is  awake  and  in 
subtle  motion  in  the  midst  of  these  cold 
abstractions.  '  The  Vegetable  World  opens 
like  a  flower  from  the  Earth's  centre,  in  which 
is  Eternity,'  and  it  is  this  outward  flower- 
ing of  eternity  in  the  delicate  living  forms  of 
time  that  goes  on  incessantly,  as  if  by  the 
mere  accident  of  the  creative  impulse,  as 
Blake  or  Los  builds  Golgonooza  or  the  City 


128  WILLIAM  BLAKE 

of  God  out  of  the  '  abstract  void '  and  the 
'  indefiniteness  of  unimaginative  existence.' 
It  is,  on  every  page,  the  visible  outer  part 
of  what,  in  the  words,  can  but  speak  a 
language  not  even  meant  to  be  the  language 
of  the  'natural  man.' 

In  these  symbolic  notations  of  nature,  or 
double  language  of  words  and  signs,  these 
little  figures  of  men  and  beasts  that  so 
strangely  and  incalculably  decorate  so  many 
of  Blake's  pages,  there  is  something  Egyp- 
tian, which  reminds  me  of  those  lovely 
riddles  on  papyri  and  funeral  tablets,  where 
the  images  of  real  things  are  used  so  decora- 
tively,  in  the  midst  of  a  language  itself  all 
pictures,  with  colours  never  seen  in  the 
things  themselves,  but  given  to  them  for 
ornament.  The  Marriage  of  Heaven  and 
Hell  is  filled  with  what  seem  like  the  hiero- 
glyphics on  an  Egyptian  tomb  or  obelisk, 
little  images  which  might  well  mean  things 
as  definite  as  the  images  of  Egyptian  writ- 
ing. They  are  still  visible,  sometimes  mere 
curves  or  twines,  in  the  latest  of  the  en- 
graved work,  and  might  exist  equally  for 
some  symbolic  life  which  they  contain,  or 
for  that  decorative  life  of  design  which 


WILLIAM  BLAKE  129 

makes  them  as  expressive  mosaics  of  pat- 
tern as  the  hieroglyphics.  I  cannot  but 
think  that  it  was  partly  from  what  he  had 
seen,  in  actual  basalt,  or  in  engravings  after 
ancient  monuments  which  must  have  been 
about  him  at  Basire  the  engraver's,  that 
Blake  found  the  suggestion  of  his  picture- 
writing  in  the  Prophetic  Books.  He  be- 
lieved that  all  Greek  art  was  but  a  pale 
copy  of  a  lost  art  of  Egypt,  '  the  greater 
works  of  the  Asiatic  Patriarchs,'  'Apothe- 
oses of  Persian,  Hindu,  and  Egyptian  an- 
tiquity.' In  such  pictures  as  '  The  Spiritual 
Form  of  Pitt  guiding  Behemoth,'  he  pro- 
fessed to  be  but  'applying  to  modern  heroes, 
on  a  smaller  scale,'  what  he  had  seen  in 
vision  of  these  '  stupendous  originals  now 
lost,  or  perhaps  buried  till  some  happier 
age.'  Is  it  not  likely  therefore  that  in  his 
attempt  to  create  the  religious  books  of  a 
new  religion,  '  the  Everlasting  Gospel '  of 
'  the  Poetic  Genius,  which  is  the  Lord,'  he 
should  have  turned  to  the  then  unintelligible 
forms  in  which  the  oldest  of  the  religions 
had  written  itself  down  in  a  visible  pictorial 
message  ? 

But,  whatever  suggestions  may  have  come 


130  WILLIAM   BLAKE 

to  him  from  elsewhere,  Blake's  genius  was 
essentially  Gothic,  and  took  form,  I  doubt 
not,  during  those  six  years  of  youth  when 
he  drew  the  monuments  in  Westminster 
Abbey,  and  in  the  old  churches  about  Lon- 
don. He  might  have  learned  much  from  the 
tombs  in  the  Abbey,  and  from  the  brasses, 
and  from  the  carved  angels  in  the  chapels, 
and  from  the  naive  groups  on  the  screen  in 
the  chapel  of  Edward  the  Confessor,  and 
from  the  draped  figures  round  the  sarco- 
phagus of  Aymer  de  Valence.  There  is 
often,  in  Blake's  figures,  something  of  the 
monumental  stiffness  of  Gothic  stone,  as 
there  is  in  the  minute  yet  formal  character- 
isation of  the  faces.  His  rendering  of  ter- 
rible and  evil  things,  the  animal  beings  who 
typify  the  passions  and  fierce  distortions  of 
the  soul,  have  the  same  childlike  detail, 
content  to  be  ludicrous  if  it  can  only  be 
faithful  to  a  distinct  conception,  of  the 
carvers  of  gargoyles  and  of  Last  Judgments. 
Blake  has,  too,  the  same  love  of  pattern  for 
its  own  sake,  the  same  exuberance  of  orna- 
ment, always  living  and  organic,  growing 
out  of  the  structure  of  the  design  or  out  of 
the  form  of  the  page,  not  added  to  it  from 


WILLIAM   BLAKE  131 

without.  Gothic  art  taught  him  his  hatred 
of  vacant  space,  his  love  of  twining  and 
trailing  foliage  and  flame  and  water;  and 
his  invention  of  ornament  is  as  unlimited  as 
theirs.  A  page  of  one  of  his  illuminated 
books  is  like  the  carving  on  a  Gothic  capital. 
Lines  uncoil  from  a  hidden  centre  and  spread 
like  branches  or  burst  into  vast  vegetation, 
emanating  from  leaf  to  limb,  and  growing 
upward  into  images  of  human  and  celestial 
existence.  The  snake  is  in  all  his  designs  ; 
whether,  in  Jerusalem,  rolled  into  chariot- 
wheels  and  into  the  harness  of  a  chariot 
drawn  by  hoofed  lions,  and  into  the  curled 
horns  of  the  lions,  and  into  the  pointing 
fingers  of  the  horns ;  or,  in  The  Marriage  of 
Heaven  and  Hell,  a  leviathan  of  the  sea 
with  open  jaws,  eyed  and  scaled  with  poison- 
ous jewels  of  purple  and  blood-red  and  cor- 
roded gold,  swelling  visibly  out  of  a  dark 
sea  that  foams  aside  from  its  passage ;  or, 
curved  above  the  limbs  and  wound  about  the 
head  of  a  falling  figure  in  lovely  diminishing 
coils  like  a  corkscrew  which  is  a  note  of  in- 
terrogation ;  or,  in  mere  unterrifying  beauty, 
trailed  like  a  branch  of  a  bending  tree  across 
the  tops  of  pages ;  or,  bitted  and  bridled  and 


132  WILLIAM  BLAKE 

a  thing  of  blithe  gaiety,  ridden  by  little, 
naked,  long-legged  girls  and  boys  in  the  new 
paradise  of  an  America  of  the  future.  The 
Gothic  carvers  loved  snakes,  but  hardly  with 
the  strange  passion  of  Blake.  They  carved 
the  flames  of  hell  and  of  earthly  punishment 
with  delight  in  the  beauty  of  their  soaring 
and  twisting  lines ;  but  no  one  has  ever 
made  of  fire  such  a  plaything  and  ecstasy  as 
Blake  has  made  of  it.  In  his  paintings  he 
invents  new  colours  to  show  forth  the  very 
soul  of  fire,  a  soul  angrier  and  more  variable 
than  opals  ;  and  in  his  drawings  he  shows 
us  lines  and  nooses  of  fire  rushing  upward 
out  of  the  ground,  and  fire  drifting  across 
the  air  like  vapour,  and  fire  consuming  the 
world  in  the  last  chaos.  And  everywhere 
there  are  gentle  and  caressing  tongues  and 
trails  of  fire,  hardly  to  be  distinguished  from 
branches  of  trees  and  blades  of  grass  and 
stems  and  petals  of  flowers.  Water,  which 
the  Gothic  carvers  represented  in  curving 
lines,  as  the  Japanese  do,  is  in  Blake  a  not 
less  frequent  method  of  decoration ;  wrap- 
ping frail  human  figures  in  wet  caverns 
under  the  depths  of  the  sea,  and  destroying 
and  creating  worlds. 


WILLIAM  BLAKE  133 

Blake's  colour  is  unearthly,  and  is  used  for 
the  most  part  rather  as  a  symbol  of  emotion 
than  as  a  representation  of  fact.  It  is  at 
one  time  prismatic,  and  radiates  in  broad 
bands  of  pure  colour ;  at  another,  and  more 
often,  is  as  inextricable  as  the  veins  in 
mineral,  and  seems  more  like  a  natural 
growth  of  the  earth  than  the  creation  of  a 
painter.  In  the  smaller  Book  of  Designs  in 
the  Print  Room  of  the  British  Museum  the 
colours  have  mouldered  away,  and  blotted 
themselves  together  in  a  sort  of  putrefac- 
tion which  seems  to  carry  the  suggestions  of 
poisonous  decay  further  than  Blake  carried 
them.  This  will  be  seen  by  a  comparison 
of  the  minutely  drawn  leviathan  of  The 
Marriage  of  Heaven  and  Hell,  with  the 
coloured  print  in  the  Book  of  Designs,  in 
which  the  outline  of  the  folds  melts  and 
crumbles  into  a  mere  chaos  of  horror. 
Colour  in  Blake  is  never  shaded,  or,  as 
he  would  have  said,  blotted  and  blurred ; 
it  is  always  pure  energy.  In  the  faint 
colouring  of  the  Book  of  Thel  there  is  the 
very  essence  of  gentleness ;  the  colour  is 
a  faultless  interpretation  of  the  faint  and 
lovely  monotony  of  the  verse,  and  of  its 


134  WILLIAM  BLAKE 

exquisite  detail.  Several  of  the  plates  recur 
in  the  Book  of  Designs,  coloured  at  a  differ- 
ent and,  no  doubt,  much  later  time  ;  and 
while  every  line  is  the  same  the  whole  atmo- 
sphere and  mood  of  the  designs  is  changed. 
Bright  rich  colour  is  built  up  in  all  the 
vacant  spaces  ;  and  with  the  colour  there 
comes  a  new  intensity ;  each  design  is  seen 
over  again,  in  a  new  way.  Here,  the  mood 
is  a  wholly  different  mood,  and  this  seeing 
by  contraries  is  easier  to  understand  than 
when,  as  in  the  splendid  design  on  the 
fourth  page  of  The  Book  of  Urizen,  re- 
peated in  the  Book  of  Designs,  we  see  a 
parallel,  yet  different,  vision,  a  new,  yet 
not  contrary,  aspect.  In  the  one,  the 
colours  of  the  open  book  are  like  corroded 
iron  or  rusty  minerals ;  in  the  other,  sharp 
blues,  like  the  wings  of  strange  butterflies, 
glitter  stormily  under  the  red  flashes  of  a 
sunset.  The  vision  is  the  same,  but  every 
colour  of  the  thing  seen  is  different. 

To  Blake,  colour  is  the  soul  rather  than 
the  body  of  his  figures,  and  seems  to  clothe 
them  like  an  emanation.  What  Behmen  says 
of  the  world  itself  might  be  said  of  Blake's 
rendering  of  the  aspects  of  the  world  and 


WILLIAM  BLAKE  135 

men.  '  The  whole  outward  visible  World,' 
he  tells  us,  'with  all  its  Being  is  a  Signature, 
or  Figure  of  the  inward  spiritual  World ; 
whatever  is  internally,  and  however  its 
Operation  is,  so  likewise  it  has  its  Charac- 
ter externally ;  like  as  the  Spirit  of  each 
Creature  sets  forth  and  manifests  the  inter- 
nal Form  of  its  Birth,  by  its  Body,  so  does 
the  Eternal  Being  also.'  Just  as  he  gives 
us  a  naked  Apollo  for  the  '  spiritual  form 
of  Pitt'  in  the  picture  in  the  National 
Gallery,  where  Pitt  is  seen  guiding  Be- 
hemoth, or  the  hosts  of  evil,  in  a  hell  of 
glowing  and  obscure  tumult,  so  he  sees  the 
soul  of  a  thing  or  being  with  no  relation 
to  its  normal  earthly  colour.  The  colours 
of  fire  and  of  blood,  an  extra-lunar  gold, 
putrescent  vegetable  colours,  and  the  stains 
in  rocks  and  sunsets,  he  sees  everywhere, 
and  renders  with  an  ecstasy  that  no  painter 
to  whom  colour  was  valuable  for  its  own 
sake  has  ever  attained.  It  is  difficult  not 
to  believe  that  he  does  not  often  use  colour 
with  a  definitely  musical  sense  of  its  har- 
monies, and  that  colour  did  not  literally 
sing  to  him,  as  it  seems,  at  least  in  a  per- 
missible figure,  to  sing  to  us  out  of  his  pages. 


136  WILLIAM  BLAKE 


VII 

AT  the  end  of  September  1800  Blake  left 
Lambeth,  and  took  a  cottage  at  Felpham, 
near  Bognor,  at  the  suggestion  of  William 
Hayley,  the  feeblest  poet  of  his  period,  who 
imagined,  with  foolish  kindness,  that  he 
could  become  the  patron  of  one  whom  he 
called  c  my  gentle  visionary  Blake.'  Hayley 
was  a  rich  man,  and,  as  the  author  of  The 
Triumphs  of  Temper,  was  looked  upon  as  a 
person  of  literary  importance.  He  did  his 
best  to  give  Blake  opportunities  of  making 
money,  by  doing  engraving  and  by  painting 
miniatures  of  the  neighbours.  He  read  Greek 
with  him  and  Klopstock.  '  Blake  is  just 
become  a  Grecian,  and  literally  learning  the 
language,'  he  says  in  one  letter,  and  in 
another :  '  Read  Klopstock  into  English  to 
Blake.'  The  effect  of  Klopstock  on  Blake 
is  to  be  seen  in  a  poem  of  ribald  magnificence, 
which  no  one  has  yet  ventured  to  print  in 
full.  The  effect  of  Blake  on  Hayley,  and  of 


WILLIAM  BLAKE  137 

Hayley  on  Blake,  can  be  realised  from  a  few 
passages  in  the  letters.  At  first  we  read  : 
'  Mr.  Hayley  acts  like  a  prince.'  Then  :  '  I 
find  on  all  hands  great  objections  to  my  doing 
anything  but  the  mere  drudgery  of  business, 
and  intimations  that,  if  I  do  not  confine 
myself  to  this,  I  shall  not  live.'  Last :  '  Mr. 
H.  is  as  much  averse  to  my  poetry  as  he  is 
to  a  chapter  in  the  Bible.  He  knows  that 
I  have  writ  it,  for  I  have  shown  it  to  him ' 
(this  is  apparently  the  Milton  or  the  Jeru- 
salem), 'and  he  has  read  part  by  his  own 
desire,  and  has  looked  with  sufficient  con- 
tempt to  enhance  my  opinion  of  it.  ...  But 
Mr.  H.  approves  of  my  designs  as  little  as 
he  does  of  my  poems,  and  I  have  been  forced 
to  insist  on  his  leaving  me,  in  both,  to  my 
own  self-will ;  for  I  am  determined  to  be  no 
longer  pestered  with  his  genteel  ignorance 
and  polite  disapprobation.  I  know  myself 
both  poet  and  painter,  and  it  is  not  his 
affected  contempt  that  can  move  to  anything 
but  a  more  assiduous  pursuit  of  both  arts. 
Indeed,  by  my  late  firmness  I  have  brought 
down  his  affected  loftiness,  and  he  begins  to 
think  that  I  have  some  genius  :  as  if  genius 
and  assurance  were  the  same  thing !  But 


138  WILLIAM  BLAKE 

his  imbecile  attempts  to  depress  me  only 
deserve  laughter.'  What  laughter  they  pro- 
duced, while  Blake  was  still  suffering  under 
them,  can  be  seen  by  any  one  who  turns  to 
the  epigrams  on  H.  in  the  note-book.  But 
the  letter  goes  on,  with  indignant  serious- 
ness :  '  But  I  was  commanded  by  my  spiritual 
friends  to  bear  all  and  be  silent,  and  to  go 
through  all  without  murmuring,  and,  in  fine, 
hope  till  my  three  years  shall  be  accom- 
plished ;  at  which  time  I  was  set  at  liberty 
to  remonstrate  against  former  conduct,  and 
to  demand  justice  and  truth ;  which  I  have 
done  in  so  effectual  a  manner  that  my  anta- 
gonist is  silenced  completely,  and  I  have 
compelled  what  should  have  been  of  freedom 
— my  just  right  as  an  artist  and  as  a  man.' 

In  Blake's  behaviour  towards  Hayley, 
which  has  been  criticised,  we  can  test  his 
sincerity  to  himself  under  all  circumstances  : 
his  impeccable  outward  courtesy,  his  con- 
cessions, '  bearing  insulting  benevolence ' 
meekly,  his  careful  kindness  towards  Hayley 
and  hard  labour  on  his  behalf,  until  the 
conviction  was  forced  upon  him  from  within 
that  '  corporeal  friends  were  spiritual  ene- 
mies,' and  that  Hayley  must  be  given  up. 


WILLIAM  BLAKE  139 

'  Remembering  the  verses  that  Hayley  sung 
When  my  heart  knocked  against  the  roof  of  my  tongue,' 

Blake  wrote  down  bitter  epigrams,  which 
were  written  down  for  mere  relief  of  mind, 
and  certainly  never  intended  for  publication  ; 
and  I  can  see  no  contradiction  between  these 
inner  revolts  and  an  outer  politeness  which 
had  in  it  its  due  measure  of  gratitude.  Both 
were  strictly  true,  and  only  in  a  weak  and 
foolish  nature  can  the  consciousness  of  kind- 
ness received  distract  or  blot  out  the  con- 
sciousness of  the  intellectual  imbecility  which 
may  lurk  behind  it.  Blake  said  : 

'  I  never  made  friends  but  by  spiritual  gifts, 
By  severe  contentions  of  friendship  and  the  burning 
fire  of  thought.' 

What  least  '  contention  of  friendship '  would 
not  have  been  too  much  for  the  '  triumphs 
of  temper '  of '  Felpham's  eldest  son '  ?  what 
'  fire  of  thought '  could  ever  have  enlightened 
his  comfortable  darkness?  And  is  it  sur- 
prising that  Blake  should  have  written  in 
final  desperation  : 

'  Thy  friendship  oft  has  made  my  heart  to  ache  : 
Do  be  my  enemy — for  friendship's  sake '  ? 


140  WILLIAM  BLAKE 

He  quarrelled  with  many  of  his  friends,  with 
those  whom  he  had  cared  for  most,  like 
Stothard  and  Flaxman ;  but  the  cause  was 
always  some  moral  indignation,  which,  just 
or  unjust,  was  believed,  and  which,  being 
believed,  could  not  have  been  acted  upon. 
With  Blake  belief  and  action  were  simul- 
taneous. '  Thought  is  Act/  as  he  wrote  on 
the  margin  of  Bacon's  essays. 

I  am  inclined  to  attribute  to  this  period 
the  writing  down  of  a  mysterious  manuscript 
in  the  possession  of  Mr.  Buxton  Forman, 
which  has  never  been  printed,  but  which,  by 
his  kind  permission,  I  have  been  allowed  to 
read.  This  manuscript  is  headed  in  large 
lettering  :  '  The  Seven  Days  of  the  Created 
World/  above  which  is  written,  as  if  by  an 
afterthought,  in  smaller  lettering  :  *  Genesis.' 
It  is  written  at  the  beginning  of  a  blue- 
covered  copy-book,  of  which  the  paper  is 
water-marked  1797.  It  consists  of  some 
two  hundred  lines  of  blank  verse,  numbered 
by  tens  in  the  margin  up  to  one  hundred  and 
fifty,  then  follow  over  fifty  more  lines  without 
numberings,  ending  without  a  full  stop  or 
any  apparent  reason  for  coming  to  an  end. 
The  handwriting  is  unmistakably  Blake's ; 


WILLIAM  BLAKE  141 

on  the  first  page  or  two  it  is  large  and 
careful ;  gradually  it  gets  smaller  and  seems 
more  hurried  or  fatigued,  as  if  it  had  all  been 
written  at  a  single  sitting.  The  earlier  part 
goes  on  without  a  break,  but  in  the  later 
part  there  are  corrections  ;  single  words  are 
altered,  sometimes  as  much  as  a  line  and  a 
half  is  crossed  out  and  rewritten,  the  lines 
are  sometimes  corrected  in  the  course  of 
writing.  If  it  were  not  for  these  signs  of 
correction  I  should  find  it  difficult  to  believe 
that  Blake  had  actually  composed  anything 
so  tamely  regular  in  metre  or  so  destitute 
of  imagination  or  symbol.  It  is  an  argu- 
ment or  statement,  written  in  the  formal 
eighteenth-century  manner,  with  pious  in- 
vocations, God  being  addressed  as  '  Sire,' 
and  '  Wisdom  Supreme '  as  his  daughter, 
epithets  are  inverted  that  they  may  fit  the 
better  into  a  line,  and  geographical  names 
heaped  up  in  a  scarcely  Miltonic  manner, 
while  Ixion  strangely  neighbours  the  'press'd 
African.'  Nowhere  is  there  any  charac- 
teristic felicity,  or  any  recognisable  sign  of 
Blake. 

When    I    saw    first    the    manuscript    it 
occurred  to  me  that  it  might  have  been  a 


142  WILLIAM  BLAKE 

fragment  of  translation  from  Klopstock,  done 
at  Felpham  under  the  immediate  dictation 
of  Hayley.  '  Read  Klopstock  into  English 
to  Blake '  we  have  seen  Hayley  noting  down. 
But  I  can  find  no  original  for  it  in  Klop- 
stock. That  Blake  could  have  written  it 
out  of  his  own  head  at  any  date  after  1797 
is  incredible,  even  as  an  experiment  in  that 
'  monotonous  cadence  like  that  used  by 
Milton  and  Shakespeare  and  all  writers  of 
English  blank  verse,  derived  from  the 
modern  bondage  of  rhyming,'  which  he  tells 
us  in  the  preface  to  Jerusalem  he  considered 
'  to  be  a  necessary  and  indispensable  part  of 
verse,'  at  the  time  '  when  this  verse  was 
first  dictated  to  me.'  The  only  resemblance 
which  we  find  to  it  in  Blake's  published 
work  is  in  an  occasional  early  fragment  like 
that  known  as  '  The  Passions,'  and  where  it 
is  so  different  from  this  or  any  of  the  early 
attempts  at  blank  verse  is  in  the  absolute 
regularity  of  the  metre.  All  I  can  suggest 
is  that  Blake  may  have  written  it  at  a  very 
early  age,  and  preserved  a  rough  draft,  which 
Hayley  may  have  induced  him  to  make  a 
clean  copy  of,  and  that  in  the  process  of 
copying  he  may  have  touched  up  the  metre 


WILLIAM  BLAKE  143 

without  altering  the  main  substance.  If 
this  is  so,  I  think  he  stopped  so  abruptly 
because  he  would  not,  even  to  oblige  Hay- 
ley,  go  on  any  longer  with  so  uncongenial  a 
task. 

Blake's  three  years  at  Felpham  (September 
1800  to  September  1803)  were  described  by 
him  as  '  my  three  years'  slumber  on  the 
banks  of  ocean/  and  there  is  no  doubt  that, 
in  spite  of  the  neighbourhood  and  kindly 
antagonism  of  Hayley,  that  '  slumber '  was, 
for  Blake,  in  a  sense  an  awakening.  It  was 
the  only  period  of  his  life  lived  out  of  London, 
and  with  Felpham,  as  he  said  in  a  letter  to 
Flaxman, '  begins  a  new  life,  because  another 
covering  of  earth  is  shaken  off.'  The  cottage 
at  Felpham  is  only  a  little  way  in  from  a 
seashore  which  is  one  of  the  loveliest  and 
most  changing  shores  of  the  English  coast. 
Whistler  has  painted  it,  and  it  is  always 
as  full  of  faint  and  wandering  colour  as  a 
Whistler.  It  was  on  this  coast  that  Rossetti 
first  learned  to  care  for  the  sea.  To  Blake 
it  must  have  been  the  realisation  of  much 
that  he  had  already  divined  in  his  imagina- 
tion. There,  as  he  wrote  to  Flaxman, 
'  heaven  opens  on  all  sides  her  golden  gates  ; 


144  WILLIAM  BLAKE 

her  windows  are  not  obstructed  by  vapours  ; 
voices  of  celestial  inhabitants  are  more  dis- 
tinctly heard  and  their  forms  more  distinctly 
seen;  and  my  cottage  is  also  a  shadow  of 
their  houses.'  He  drew  the  cottage  on  one 
of  the  pages  of  Milton,  with  a  naked  image 
of  himself  walking  in  the  garden,  and  the 
image  of  an  angel  about  to  alight  on  a  tree. 
The  cottage  is  still,  as  he  found  it,  '  a  perfect 
model  for  cottages,  and  I  think  for  palaces 
of  magnificence,  only  enlarging,  not  altering 
its  proportions,  and  adding  ornaments  and 
not  principles ' ;  and  no  man  of  imagination 
could  live  there,  under  that  thatched  roof 
and  with  that  marvellous  sea  before  him, 
and  not  find  himself  spiritually  naked  and 
within  arm's  reach  of  the  angels. 

The  sea  has  the  properties  of  sleep  and  of 
awakening,  and  there  can  be  no  doubt  that 
the  sea  had  both  those  influences  on  Blake, 
surrounding  him  for  once  with  an  atmo- 
sphere like  that  of  his  own  dreams.  '  O 
lovely  Felpham,'  he  writes,  after  he  had  left 
it,  '  to  thee  I  am  eternally  indebted  for  my 
three  years'  rest  from  perturbation  and  the 
strength  I  now  enjoy.'  Felpham  represents 
a  vivid  pause,  in  which  he  had  leisure  to 


WILLIAM   BLAKE  145 

return  upon  himself;  and  in  one  of  his 
letters  he  says  :  '  One  thing  of  real  con- 
sequence I  have  accomplished  by  coming 
into  the  country,  which  is  to  me  consola- 
tion enough,  namely,  I  have  recollected  all 
my  scattered  thoughts  on  art,  and  resumed 
my  primitive  and  original  ways  of  execution 
in  both  painting  and  engraving,  which  in 
the  confusion  of  London  I  had  very  much 
obliterated  from  my  mind/  It  is  to  this 
period,  no  doubt  (a  period  mentally  over- 
come in  the  quiet  of  Felpham,  but  awaiting, 
as  we  shall  see,  the  electric  spark  of  that 
visit  to  the  Truchsessian  Gallery  in  London), 
that  Blake  refers  in  the  Descriptive  Cata- 
logue, when  he  speaks  of  the  'experiment 
pictures '  which  '  were  the  result  of  tempta- 
tions and  perturbations,  labouring  to  destroy 
imaginative  power,  by  means  of  that  in- 
fernal machine,  called  Chiaro  Oscuro,  in  the 
hands  of  Venetian  and  Flemish  demons/ 
such  as  the  '  outrageous  demon/  Rubens, 
the  *  soft  and  effeminate  and  cruel  demon/ 
Correggio,  and,  above  all,  Titian.  'The 
spirit  of  Titian/  we  are  told,  in  what  is 
really  a  confession  of  Blake's  consciousness 
of  the  power  of  those  painters  whose  in- 

K 


146  WILLIAM  BLAKE 

fluence  he  dreaded,  '  was  particularly  active 
in  raising  doubts  concerning  the  possibility 
of  executing  without  a  model ;  and,  when 
once  he  had  raised  the  doubt,  it  became  easy 
for  him  to  snatch  away  the  vision  time  after 
tune  ;  for  when  the  artist  took  his  pencil,  to 
execute  his  ideas,  his  power  of  imagination 
weakened  so  much,  and  darkened,  that 
memory  of  nature  and  of  pictures  of  the 
various  schools  possessed  his  mind,  instead 
of  appropriate  execution,  resulting  from  the 
inventions.'  It  was  thus  at  Felpham  that 
he  returned  to  himself  in  art,  and  it  was  at 
Felpham  also  that  he  had  what  seems  to 
have  been  the  culminating  outburst  of 
'  prophetic '  inspiration,  writing  from  im- 
mediate dictation,  he  said,  '  and  even 
against  my  will.'  Visions  came  readily  to 
him  out  of  the  sea,  and  he  saw  them  walk 
on  the  shore,  'majestic  shadows,  grey  but 
luminous,  and  superior  to  the  common 
height  of  men.' 

It  was  at  Felpham  that  Blake  wrote  the 
two  last  of  the  Prophetic  Books  which 
remain  to  us,  Milton  and  Jerusalem.  Both 
bear  the  date  of  1804  on  the  title-page,  and 
this,  no  doubt,  indicates  that  the  engraving 


WILLIAM  BLAKE  147 

was  begun  in  that  year.  Yet  it  is  not 
certain  that  the  engraved  text  of  Jerusalem, 
at  any  rate,  was  formally  published  till  after 
1809.  Pages  were  certainly  inserted  be- 
tween those  two  dates.  On  p.  38  Blake 
says : 

'  I  heard  in  Lambeth's  shades : 

In  Felpham  I  heard  and  saw  the  Visions  of  Albion  : 
I  write  in  South  Molton  Street,  what  I  both  see  and 

hear, 
In  regions  of  Humanity,  in  London's  opening  streets.' 

That  the  main  part  was  writen  in  Felpham 
is  evident  from  more  than  one  letter  to 
Butts.  In  a  letter  dated  April  25,  1803, 
Blake  says :  '  But  none  can  know  the 
spiritual  acts  of  my  three  years'  slumber 
on  the  banks  of  ocean,  unless  he  has  seen 
them  in  the  spirit,  or  unless  he  should  read 
my  long  poem  descriptive  of  those  acts ;  for 
I  have  in  these  years  composed  an  immense 
number  of  verses  on  one  grand  theme, 
similar  to  Homer's  Iliad  or  Milton's  Para- 
dise Lost ;  the  persons  and  machinery 
entirely  new  to  the  inhabitants  of  earth 
(some  of  the  persons  excepted).  I  have 
written  the  poems  from  immediate  dictation, 
twelve  or  sometimes  twenty  or  thirty  lines 


148  WILLIAM   BLAKE 

at  a  time,  without  premeditation,  and  even 
against  my  will.  The  time  it  has  taken  in 
writing  was  thus  rendered  non-existent,  and 
an  immense  poem  exists  which  seems  to  be 
the  labour  of  a  long  life,  all  produced  with- 
out labour  or  study.  I  mention  this  to 
show  you  what  I  think  the  grand  reason  of 
my  being  brought  down  here.'  The  poem  is 
evidently  Jerusalem,  for  the  address  '  To 
the  Public '  on  the  first  page  begins  :  '  After 
my  three  years'  slumber  on  the  banks  of  the 
Ocean,  I  again  Display  my  Giant  forms  to 
the  Public.'  In  the  next  letter,  dated 
July  6,  Blake  again  refers  to  the  poem : 
'  Thus  I  hope  that  all  our  three  years' 
trouble  ends  in  good-luck  at  last,  and 
shall  be  forgot  by  my  affections,  and  only 
remembered  by  my  understanding,  to  be 
a  memento  in  time  to  come,  and  to  speak 
to  future  generations  by  a  sublime  allegory, 
which  is  now  perfectly  completed  into  a 
grand  poem.  I  may  praise  it,  since  I  dare 
not  pretend  to  be  any  other  than  the 
secretary ;  the  authors  are  in  eternity.  I 
consider  it  as  the  grandest  poem  that  this 
world  contains.  Allegory  addressed  to  the 
intellectual  powers,  while  it  is  altogether 


WILLIAM  BLAKE  149 

hidden  from  the  corporeal  understanding,  is 
my  definition  of  the  most  sublime  poetry. 
It  is  somewhat  in  the  same  manner  defined 
by  Plato.  This  poem  shall,  by  divine 
assistance,  be  progressively  printed  and 
ornamented  with  prints,  and  given  to  the 
public.' 

This  I  take  to  mean  that  before  Blake's 
return  to  London  in  1803  the  letterpress  of 
Jerusalem  was,  as  he  imagined,  completely 
finished,  but  that  the  printing  and  illustra- 
tion were  not  yet  begun.  The  fact  of  this 
delay,  and  the  fact  that  pages  written  after 
1803  were  inserted  here  and  there,  must  not 
lead  us  to  think,  as  many  writers  on  Blake 
have  thought,  that  there  could  be  any 
allusion  in  Jerusalem  to  the  attacks  of  the 
Examiner  of  1808  and  1809,  or  that 
1  Hand,'  one  of  the  wicked  sons  of  Albion, 
could  possibly  be,  as  Rossetti  desperately 
conjectured,  'a  hieroglyph  for  Leigh  Hunt.' 
The  sons  of  Albion  are  referred  to  on  quite 
a  third  of  the  pages  of  Jerusalem,  from  the 
earliest  to  the  latest,  and  must  have  been 
part  of  the  whole  texture  of  the  poem  from 
the  beginning.  In  a  passage  of  the  '  Pubh'c 
Address/  contained  in  the  Rossetti  MS., 


150  WILLIAM  BLAKE 

Blake  says :  '  The  manner  in  which  my 
character  has  been  blasted  these  thirty 
years,  both  as  an  artist  and  as  a  man,  may 
be  seen  particularly  in  a  Sunday  paper 
called  the  Examiner,  published  in  Beaufort's 
Buildings ;  the  manner  in  which  I  have 
rooted  out  the  nest  of  villains  will  be  seen 
in  a  poem  concerning  my  three  years' 
Herculean  labours  at  Felpham,  which  I 
shall  soon  publish.'  Even  if  this  is  meant 
for  Jerusalem,  as  it  may  well  be,  Blake  is 
far  from  saying  that  he  has  referred  in  the 
poem  to  these  particular  attacks  :  '  the  nest 
of  villains  '  has  undoubtedly  a  much  broader 
meaning,  and  groups  together  all  the  attacks 
of  thirty  years,  public  or  private,  of  which 
the  Examiner  is  but  quoted  as  a  recent 
example. 

The  chief  reason  for  supposing  that  Jeru- 
salem may  not  have  been  published  till  after 
the  exhibition  of  1809,  is  to  be  found  in  a 
passage  in  the  Descriptive  Catalogue  which 
seems  to  summarise  the  main  subject  of  the 
poem,  though  it  is  quite  possible  that  it 
may  refer  to  some  MS.  now  lost.  The 
picture  of  the  Ancient  Britons,  says  Blake, 
represents  three  men  who  '  were  originally 


WILLIAM  BLAKE  151 

one  man  who  was  fourfold.  He  was  self- 
divided,  and  his  real  humanity  slain  on  the 
stems  of  generation,  and  the  form  of  the 
fourth  was  like  the  Son  of  God.  How  he 
became  divided  is  a  subject  of  great  sub- 
limity and  pathos.  The  Artist  has  written 
it,  under  inspiration,  and  will,  if  God  please, 
publish  it.  It  is  voluminous,  and  contains 
the  ancient  history  of  Britain,  and  the  world 
of  Satan  and  Adam.'  '  All  these  things,'  he 
has  just  said,  '  are  written  in  Eden.'  And 
he  says  further :  c  The  British  Antiquities 
are  now  in  the  Artist's  hands ;  all  his 
visionary  contemplations  relating  to  his 
own  country  and  its  ancient  glory,  when  it 
was,  as  it  again  shall  be,  the  source  of 
learning  and  inspiration.'  '  Adam  was  a 
Druid,  and  Noah.'  In  the  description  of 
his  picture  of  the  '  Last  Judgment '  Blake 
indicates  '  Albion,  our  ancestor,  patriarch  of 
the  Atlantic  Continent,  whose  history  pre- 
ceded that  of  the  Hebrews,  and  in  whose 
sleep,  or  chaos,  creation  began.  The  good 
woman  is  Britannia,  the  wife  of  Albion. 
Jerusalem  is  their  daughter.' 

We  see  here  the  symbols,  partly  Jewish 
and  partly  British,  into  which  Blake  had 


152  WILLIAM   BLAKE 

gradually  resolved  his  mythology.  'The 
persons  and  machinery,'  he  said,  were 
'  entirely  new  to  the  inhabitants  of  earth 
(some  of  the  persons  excepted).'  This  has 
been  usually,  but  needlessly,  supposed  to 
mean  that  real  people  are  introduced  under 
disguises.  Does  it  not  rather  mean,  what 
would  be  strictly  true,  that  the  '  machinery ' 
is  here  of  a  kind  wholly  new  to  the  Pro- 
phetic Books,  while  of  the  '  persons '  some 
have  already  been  met  with,  others  are  now 
seen  for  the  first  time?  It  is  all,  in  his 
own  words,  'allegory  addressed  to  the 
intellectual  powers,  while  it  is  altogether 
hidden  from  the  corporeal  understanding,' 
and  the  allegory  becomes  harder  to  read  as 
it  becomes  more  and  more  naked,  concen- 
trated, and  unexplained.  Milton  seems  to 
have  arisen  out  of  a  symbol  which  came 
visibly  before  Blake's  eyes  on  his  first  waking 
in  the  cottage  at  Felpham.  '  Work  will  go 
on  here  with  Godspeed/  he  writes  to  Butts. 
*A  roller  and  two  harrows  lie  before  my 
window.  I  met  a  plough  on  my  first  going 
out  at  my  gate  the  first  morning  after 
my  arrival,  and  the  ploughboy  said  to 
the  ploughman,  "  Father,  the  gate  is 


WILLIAM   BLAKE  153 

open."1  At  the  beginning  of  his  poem 
Blake  writes : 

'  The  Plow  goes  forth  in  tempests  and  lightnings  and 

the  Harrow  cruel 

In  blights  of  the  east;  the  heavy  Holler  follows  in 
bowlings ' ; 

and  the  imagery  returns  at  intervals,  in  the 
vision  of  'the  Last  Vintage/  the  'Great 
Harvest  and  Vintage  of  the  Nations.'  The 
personal  element  comes  in  the  continual 
references  to  the  cottage  at  Felpham ; 

*  He  set  me  down  in  Felpham's  Vale  and  prepared  a 

beautiful 
Cottage  for  me  that  in  three  years  I  might  write  all 

these  Visions 
To  display  Nature's  cruel  holiness :  the  deceits  of 

Natural  Religion ' ; 

and  it  is  in  the  cottage  near  the  sea  that  he 
sees  the  vision  of  Milton,  when  he 

'  Descended  down  a  Paved  work  of  all  kinds  of  precious 

stones 
Out  from  the  eastern  sky ;  descending  down  into  my 

Cottage 
Garden;    clothed  in  black,   severe    and    silent    he 

descended.' 

He  awakes  from  the  vision  to  find  his  wife 
by  his  side : 


154  WILLIAM  BLAKE 

'  My  bones  trembled.     I  fell  outstretched  upon  the 

path 

A  moment,  and  my  Soul  returned  into  its  mortal  state 
To  Resurrection  and  Judgment  in  the  Vegetable  Body, 
And  my  sweet  Shadow  of  delight  stood  trembling  by 

my  side.' 

In  the  prayer  to  be  saved  from  his  friends 
(*  Corporeal  Friends  are  Spiritual  Enemies '), 
in  the  defence  of  wrath  ('Go  to  thy  labours 
at  the  Mills  and  leave  me  to  my  wrath '),  in 
the  outburst : 

'  The  idiot  Reasoner  laughs  at  the  Man  of  Imagination 
And  from  laughter  proceeds  to  murder  by  under- 
valuing calumny,' 

it  is  difficult  not  to  see  some  trace  or  trans- 
position of  the  kind,  evil  counsellor  Hayley, 
a  '  Satan '  of  mild  falsehood  in  the  sight  of 
Blake.  But  the  main  aim  of  the  book  is 
the  assertion  of  the  supremacy  of  the 
imagination : 

'  The  Imagination  is  not  a  State :  it  is  the  Human 
Existence  itself,' 

and  the  putting  off  of  the  '  filthy  garments/ 
of  '  Rational  Demonstration/  of  '  Memory/ 
of '  Bacon,  Locke,  and  Newton/  the  clothing 
of  oneself  in  imagination, 


WILLIAM  BLAKE  155 

'  To  cast  aside  from  Poetry,  all  that  is  not  Inspira- 
tion, 

That  it  shall  no  longer  dare  to  mock  with  the  asper- 
sion of  Madness 

Cast  on  the  Inspired  by  the  tame  high  finisher  of 
paltry  Blots, 

Indefinite  or  paltry  Ehymes ;  or  paltry  harmonies.' 

It  is  because  '  Everything  in  Eternity  shines 
by  its  own  Internal  light/  and  that  jealousy 
and  cruelty  and  hypocrisy  are  all  darkenings 
of  that  light,  that  Blake  declares  his  pur- 
pose of 

'  Opening  to  every  eye 
These  wonders  of  Satan's  holiness  showing  to  the 

Earth 
The  Idol  Virtues  of  the  Natural  Heart,  and  Satan's 

Seat 

Explore  in  all  its  Selfish  Natural  Virtue,  and  put  off 
In  Self-annihilation  all  that  is  not  of  God  alone.' 

Such  meanings  as  these  flare  out  from  time 
to  time  with  individual  splendours  of  phrase, 
like  '  Time  is  the  mercy  of  Eternity/  and 
the  great  poetic  epigram,  '  O  Swedenborg ! 
strongest  of  men,  the  Samson  shorn  by  the 
Churches '  (where,  for  a  moment,  a  line  falls 
into  the  regular  rhythm  of  poetry),  and 
around  them  are  deserts  and  jungles,  frag- 


156  WILLIAM   BLAKE 

ments  of  myth  broken  off  and  flung  before 
us  after  this  fashion  : 

'  But  Rahab  and  Tirzah  pervert 
Their  mild  influences,  therefore  the  Seven  Eyes  of 

God  walk  round 
The  Three  Heavens  of  Ulro,  where  Tirzah  and  her 

Sisters 
Weave  the  black  Woof  of  Death  upon  Entuthon 

Benython 
In  the  Vale  of  Surrey  where  Horeb  terminates  in 

Rephaim.' 

In  Jerusalem,  which  was  to  have  been 
'  the  grandest  poem  which  the  world  con- 
tains,' there  is  less  of  the  exquisite  lyrical 
work  which  still  decorates  many  corners  of 
Milton,  but  it  is  Blake's  most  serious 
attempt  to  set  his  myth  in  order,  and  it 
contains  much  of  his  deepest  wisdom,  with 
astonishing  flashes  of  beauty.  In  Milton 
there  was  still  a  certain  approximation  to 
verse,  most  of  the  lines  had  at  least  a  begin- 
ning and  an  end,  but  in  Jerusalem,  although 
he  tells  us  that  '  every  word  and  every  letter 
is  studied  and  put  into  its  place,'  I  am  by 
no  means  sure  that  Blake  ever  intended  the 
lines,  as  he  wrote  them,  to  be  taken  as 
metrical  lines,  or  read  very  differently  from 


WILLIAM  BLAKE  157 

the  prose  of  the  English  Bible,  with  its 
pause  in  the  sense  at  the  end  of  each  verse. 
A  vague  line,  hesitating  between  six  and 
seven  beats,  does  indeed  seem  from  time 
to  time  to  emerge  from  chaos,  and  inversions 
are  brought  in  at  times  to  accentuate  a 
cadence  certainly  intended,  as  here  : 

'  Why  should  Punishment  Weave  the  Veil  with  Iron 

Wheels  of  War, 

When  Forgiveness  might  it  Weave  with  Wings  of 
Cherubim  1 ' 

But  read  the  whole  book  as  if  it  were  prose, 
following  the  sense  for  its  own  sake,  and 
you  will  find  that  the  prose,  when  it  is  not 
a  mere  catalogue,  has  generally  a  fine  biblical 
roll  and  swing  in  it,  a  rhythm  of  fine  oratory; 
while  if  you  read  each  line  as  if  it  were 
meant  to  be  a  metrical  unit  you  will  come 
upon  such  difficulties  as  this  : 

'  Such  is  the  Forgiveness  of  the  G-ods,  the  Moral  Vir- 
tues of  the ' 

That  is  one  line,  and  the  next  adds  'Heathen.' 
There  may  seem  to  be  small  reason  for  such 
an  arrangement  of  the  lines  if  we  read 
Jerusalem  in  the  useful  printed  text  of 


158  WILLIAM  BLAKE 

Mr.  Russell  and  Mr.  Maclagan ;  but  the 
reason  will  be  seen  if  we  turn  to  the  original 
engraved  page,  where  we  shall  see  that 
Blake  had  set  down  in  the  margin  a  lovely 
little  bird  with  outstretched  wings,  and  that 
the  tip  of  the  bird's  wing  almost  touches  the 
last  letter  of  the  '  the '  and  leaves  no  room 
for  another  word.  That  such  a  line  was 
meant  to  be  metrical  is  unthinkable,  as 
unthinkable  as  that 

'  Los  stood  and  stamped  the  earth,  then  he  threw  down 

his  hammer  in  rage  & 
In  fury ' 

has  any  reason  for  existing  in  this  form 
beyond  the  mere  chance  of  a  hand  that 
writes  until  all  the  space  of  a  given  line  is 
filled.  Working  as  he  did  within  those 
limits  of  his  hand's  space,  he  would  accustom 
himself  to  write  for  the  most  part,  and 
and  especially  when  his  imagination  was 
most  vitally  awake,  in  lines  that  came 
roughly  within  those  limits.  Thus  it  will 
often  happen  that  the  most  beautiful  pas- 
sages will  have  the  nearest  resemblance  to 
a  regular  metrical  scheme,  as  in  such  lines 
as  these : 


WILLIAM  BLAKE  159 

In  vain  :  he  is  hurried  afar  into  an  unknown  Night. 
He  bleeds  in  torrents   of  blood,  as   he   rolls   thro' 

heaven  above, 
He  chokes  up  the  paths  of  the  sky :   the  Moon  is 

leprous  as  snow : 
Trembling  and  descending  down,  seeking  to  rest  on 

high  Mona : 
Scattering  her  leprous  snow  in  flakes  of  disease  over 

Albion. 
The  Stars  flee  remote :  the  heaven  is  iron,  the  earth 

is  sulphur, 
And  all  the  mountains  and  hills  shrink  up  like  a 

withering  gourd.' 

Here  the  prophet  is  no  longer  speaking  with 
the  voice  of  the  orator,  but  with  the  old, 
almost  forgotten  voice  of  the  poet,  and  with 
something  of  the  despised  '  Monotonous 
Cadence.' 

Blake  lived  for  twenty-three  years  after 
the  date  on  the  title-page  of  Jerusalem,  but, 
with  the  exception  of  the  two  plates  called 
The  Ghost  of  Abel,  engraved  in  1822,  this 
vast  and  obscure  encyclopaedia  of  unknown 
regions  remains  his  last  gospel.  He  thought 
it  his  most  direct  message.  Throughout  the 
Prophetic  Books  Blake  has  to  be  translated 
out  of  the  unfamiliar  language  into  which 
he  has  tried  to  translate  spiritual  realities, 


160  WILLIAM  BLAKE 

literally,  as  he  apprehended  them.  Just  as, 
in  the  designs  which  his  hand  drew  as  best 
it  could,  according  to  its  limited  and  partly 
false  knowledge,  from  the  visions  which  his 
imagination  saw  with  perfect  clearness,  he 
was  often  unable  to  translate  that  vision 
into  its  real  equivalent  in  design,  so  in  his 
attempts  to  put  these  other  mental  visions 
into  words  he  was  hampered  by  an  equally 
false  method,  and  often  by  reminiscences  of 
what  passed  for  '  picturesque '  writing  in 
the  work  of  his  contemporaries.  He  was, 
after  all,  of  his  time,  though  he  was  above 
it,  and  just  as  he  only  knew  Michelangelo 
through  bad  reproductions,  and  could  never 
get  his  own  design  wholly  free,  malleable, 
and  virgin  to  his  '  shaping  spirit  of  imagina- 
tion,' so,  in  spite  of  all  his  marvellous  lyrical 
discoveries,  made  when  his  mind  was  less 
burdened  by  the  weight  of  a  controlling 
message,  he  found  himself,  when  he  at- 
tempted to  make  an  intelligible  system  out 
of  the  c  improvisations  of  the  spirit,'  and  to 
express  that  system  with  literal  accuracy, 
the  half-helpless  captive  of  formal  words, 
conventional  rhythms,  a  language  not  drawn 
direct  from  its  source.  Thus  we  find, 


WILLIAM  BLAKE  161 

in  the  Prophetic  Books,  neither  achieved 
poems  nor  an  achieved  philosophy.  The 
philosophy  has  reached .  us  only  in  splendid 
fragments  (the  glimmering  of  stars  out  of 
separate  corners  of  a  dark  sky),  and  we  shall 
never  know  to  what  extent  these  fragments 
were  once  parts  of  a  whole.  Had  they  been 
ever  really  fused,  this  would  have  been  the 
only  system  of  philosophy  made  entirely  out 
of  the  raw  material  of  poetry.  As  it  has 
come  to  us  unachieved,  the  world  has  still 
to  wait  for  a  philosophy  untouched  by  the 
materialism  of  the  prose  intelligence. 

In  the  Prophetic  Books  Blake  labours  at 
the  creation  of  a  myth,  which  may  be  figured 
as  the  representation  in  space  of  a  vast 
spiritual  tragedy.  It  is  the  tragedy  of  Man, 
a  tragedy  in  which  the  first  act  is  creation. 
Milton  was  content  to  begin  with  '  Man's 
first  disobedience/  but  Blake  would  track 
the  human  soul  back  into  chaos,  and  beyond. 
He  knows,  like  Krishna,  in  the  Bhagavad 
Gita,  that  '  above  this  visible  nature  there 
exists  another,  unseen  and  eternal,  which, 
when  all  created  things  perish,  does  not 
perish ' ;  and  he  sees  the  soul's  birth  in 
that  '  inward  spiritual  world,'  from  which  it 

L 


162  WILLIAM  BLAKE 

falls  to  mortal  life  and  the  body,  as  into 
a  death.  He  sees  its  new,  temporal  life, 
hung  round  with  fears  and  ambushes,  out 
of  which,  by  a  new  death,  the  death  of  that 
mortal  self  which  separates  it  from  eternity, 
it  may  reawaken,  even  in  this  life,  into  the 
eternal  life  of  imagination.  The  persons  of 
the  drama  are  the  powers  and  passions  of 
Man,  and  the  spiritual  forces  which  surround 
him,  and  are  the  '  states '  through  which  he 
passes.  Man  is  seen,  as  Blake  saw  all 
things,  fourfold :  Man's  Humanity,  his 
Spectre,  who  is  Reason,  his  Emanation,  who 
is  Imagination,  his  Shadow,  who  is  Desire. 
And  the  states  through  which  Man  passes, 
friendly  or  hostile,  energies  of  good  or  of 
evil,  are  also  four :  the  Four  Zoas,  who  are 
the  Four  Living  Creatures  of  Ezekiel,  and 
are  called  Urizen,  Luvah,  Tharmas,  and 
Urthona  (or,  to  mortals,  Los).  Each  Zoa 
has  his  Emanation :  Ahania,  who  is  the 
emanation  of  Intellect,  and  is  named 
'  eternal  delight ' ;  Vala,  the  emanation  of 
Emotion,  who  is  lovely  deceit,  and  the 
visible  beauty  of  Nature ;  Enion,  who  is 
the  emanation  of  the  Senses,  and  typifies 
the  maternal  instinct ;  Enitharmon,  who  is 


WILLIAM  BLAKE  163 

the  emanation  of  Intuition,  and  personifies 
spiritual  beauty.  The  drama  is  the  division, 
death,  and  resurrection,  in  an  eternal  circle, 
of  the  powers  of  man  and  of  the  powers  in 
whose  midst  he  fights  and  struggles.  Of 
this  incommensurable  action  we  are  told 
only  in  broken  hints,  as  of  a  chorus  crying 
outside  doors  where  deeds  are  being  done  in 
darkness.  Images  pass  before  us,  make 
their  gesture,  and  are  gone ;  the  words 
spoken  are  ambiguous,  and  seem  to  have 
an  under  meaning  which  it  is  essential  for 
us  to  apprehend.  We  see  motions  of  build- 
ing and  of  destruction,  higher  than  the  top- 
most towers  of  the  world,  and  deeper  than 
the  abyss  of  the  sea ;  souls  pass  through 
furnaces,  and  are  remade  by  Time's  hammer 
on  the  anvil  of  space ;  there  are  obscure 
crucifixions,  and  Last  Judgments  return  and 
are  re-enacted. 

To  Blake,  the  Prophetic  Books  were  to  be 
the  new  religious  books  of  a  religion  which 
was  not  indeed  new,  for  it  was  the  '  Ever- 
lasting Gospel'  of  Jesus,  but,  because  it 
had  been  seen  anew  by  Swedenborg  and  by 
Wesley  and  by  '  the  gentle  souls  who  guide 
the  great  wine-press  of  Love,'  among  whom 


164  WILLIAM  BLAKE 

was  Teresa,  seemed  to  require  a  new  inter- 
pretation to  the  imagination.  Blake  wrote 
when  the  eighteenth  century  was  coming  to 
an  end ;  he  announced  the  new  dispensation 
which  was  to  come,  Swedenborg  had  said, 
with  the  year  (which  was  the  year  of  Blake's 
birth)  1757.  He  looked  forward  steadfastly 
to  the  time  when  '  Sexes  must  vanish  and 
cease  to  be,'  when  '  all  their  crimes,  their 
punishments,  their  accusations  of  sin,  all 
their  jealousies,  revenges,  murders,  hidings 
of  cruelty  in  deceit,  appear  only  on  the  out- 
ward spheres  of  visionary  Space  and  Time, 
in  the  shadows  of  possibility  by  mutual  for- 
giveness for  evermore,  and  in  the  vision  and 
the  prophecy,  that  we  may  foresee  and 
avoid  the  terrors  of  Creation  and  Redemp- 
tion and  Judgment.'  He  spoke  to  literalists, 
rationalists,  materialists ;  to  an  age  whose 
very  infidels  doubted  only  facts,  and  whose 
deists  affirmed  no  more  than  that  man  was 
naturally  religious.  The  rationalist's  denial 
of  everything  beyond  the  evidence  of  his 
senses  seemed  to  him  a  criminal  blindness ; 
and  he  has  engraved  a  separate  sheet  with 
images  and  statements  of  the  affirmation  : 
'  There  is  no  Natural  Religion.'  To  Blake 


WILLIAM  BLAKE  165 

the  literal  meaning  of  things  seemed  to  be 
of  less  than  no  importance.  To  worship  the 
'  Goddess  Nature '  was  to  worship  the  '  God 
of  this  World,'  and  so  to  be  an  atheist,  as 
even  Wordsworth  seemed  to  him  to  be. 
Religion  was  asleep,  with  Art  and  Literature 
in  its  arms  :  Blake's  was  the  voice  of  the 
awakening  angel.  What  he  cried  was  that 
only  eternal  and  invisible  things  were  true, 
and  that  visible  temporal  things  were  a  veil 
and  a  delusion.  In  this  he  knew  himself  to 
be  on  the  side  of  Wesley  and  Whitefield,  and 
that  Voltaire  and  Rousseau,  the  voices  of 
the  passing  age,  were  against  him.  He 
called  them  '  frozen  sons  of  the  feminine 
Tabernacle  of  Bacon,  Newton,  and  Locke.' 
Wesley  and  Whitefield  he  calls  the  'two 
servants '  of  God,  his  '  two  witnesses.' 

But  it  seemed  to  him  that  he  could  go 
deeper  into  the  Bible  than  they,  in  their 
practical  eagerness,  had  gone.  '  What  are 
the  treasures  of  Heaven,'  he  asked,  '  that 
we  are  to  lay  up  for  ourselves — are  they  any 
other  than  Mental  Studies  and  Perform- 
ances ? '  'Is  the  Holy  Ghost/  he  asked, 
'  any  other  than  an  intellectual  Fountain  ? ' 
It  seemed  to  him  that  he  could  harmonise 


166  WILLIAM  BLAKE 

many  things  once  held  to  be  discordant, 
and  adjust  the  many  varying  interpreta- 
tions of  the  Bible  and  the  other  books  of 
ancient  religions  by  a  universal  application  of 
what  had  been  taken  in  too  personal  a  way. 
Hence  many  of  the  puzzling  'correspon- 
dences' of  English  cities  and  the  tribe  of 
Judah,  of  '  the  Poetic  Genius,  which  is  the 
Lord.' 

There  is  an  outcry  in  Jerusalem  : 

1  No  individual  ought  to  appropriate  to  Himself 

Or  to  his  Emanation,  any  of  the  Universal  Character- 
istics 

Of  David  or  of  Eve,  of  the  Woman,  of  the  Lord, 

Of  Reuben  or  of  Benjamin,  of  Joseph  or  Judah  or 
Levi. 

Those  who  dare  appropriate  to  themselves  Universal 
Attributes 

Are  the  Blasphemous  Selfhoods  and  must  be  broken 
asunder. 

A  Vegetable  Christ  and  a  Virgin  Eve,  are  the  Herma- 
phroditic 

Blasphemy :  by  his  Maternal  Birth  he  put  off  that 
Evil  One, 

And  his  Maternal  Humanity  must  be  put  off  Eter- 
nally, 

Lest  the  Sexual  Generation  swallow  up  Regenera- 
tion: 

Come,  Lord  Jesus,  take  on  Thee  the  Satanic  Body  of 
Holiness  ! ' 


WILLIAM  BLAKE  167 

• 

Exactly  what  is  meant  here  will  be  seen 
more  clearly  if  we  compare  it  with  a  much 
earlier  statement  of  the  same  doctrine,  in 
the  poem  '  To  Tirzah  '  in  the  Songs  of  Ex- 
perience, and  the  comparison  will  show  us 
all  the  difference  between  the  art  of  Blake 
in  1794,  and  what  seemed  to  him  the 
needful  manner  of  his  message  ten  years 
later.  '  Tirzah '  is  Blake's  name  for  Natural 
Religion. 

'  Whatever  is  Born  of  Mortal  Birth 
Must  be  consumed  with  the  Earth, 
To  rise  from  Generation  free  : 
Then  what  have  I  to  do  with  thee  ? 

The  Sexes  sprung  from  Shame  and  Pride 
BlowM  in  the  morn ;  in  evening  died  ; 
But  Mercy  changed  Death  into  Sleep ; 
The  Sexes  rose  to  work  and  weep. 

Thou  Mother  of  my  Mortal  part 
With  cruelty  didst  mould  my  Heart, 
And  with  false,  self-deceiving  Tears 
Didst  bind  my  Nostrils,  Eyes,  and  Ears ; 

Didst  close  my  Tongue  in  senseless  clay, 
And  me  to  Mortal  Life  betray : 
The  Death  of  Jesus  set  me  free  : 
Then  what  have  I  to  do  with  thee  ? ' 

Here  is  expressed  briefly  and  exquisitely  a 


168  WILLIAM  BLAKE 

« 

large  part  of  the  foundation  of  Blake's 
philosophy :  that  birth  into  the  world, 
Christ's  or  ours,  is  a  fall  from  eternal  realities 
into  the  material  affections  of  the  senses, 
which  are  deceptions,  and  bind  us  under  the 
bondage  of  nature,  our  '  Mother,'  who  is  the 
Law ;  and  that  true  life  is  to  be  regained 
only  by  the  death  of  that  self  which  cuts  us 
off  from  our  part  in  eternity,  which  we  enter 
through  the  eternal  reality  of  the  imagina- 
tion. In  the  poem,  the  death  of  Jesus 
symbolises  that  deliverance  ;  in  the  passage 
from  Jerusalem  the  Church's  narrow  con- 
ception of  the  mortal  life  of  Jesus  is 
rebuked,  and  its  universal  significance  in- 
dicated, but  in  how  different,  how  obscure, 
how  distorted  a  manner.  What  has  brought 
about  this  new  manner  of  saying  the  same 
thing? 

I  think  it  is  an  endeavour  to  do  without 
what  had  come  to  seem  to  Blake  the  deceiv- 
ing imageries  of  nature,  to  express  the  truth 
of  contraries  at  one  and  the  same  time,  and 
to  render  spiritual  realities  in  a  literal  trans- 
lation. What  he  had  been  writing  was 
poetry ;  now  what  he  wrote  was  to  be  pro- 
phecy ;  or,  as  he  says  in  Milton  : 


WILLIAM  BLAKE  169 

'  In  fury  of  Poetic  Inspiration, 

To  build  the  Universe   Stupendous,  Mental  Forms 
Creating.' 

And,  seeking  always  the  'Minute  Par- 
ticulars/ he  would  make  no  compromise  with 
earthly  things,  use  no  types  of  humanity,  no 
analogies  from  nature ;  for  it  was  against 
all  literal  acceptance  of  nature  or  the  Bible 
or  reason,  of  any  apparent  reality,  that  he 
was  appealing.  Hence 

'  All  Human  Forms  identified,  even  Tree,  Metal,  Earth, 

and  Stone,  all 
Human  Forms    identified,  living,   going   forth,   and 

returning  wearied 

Into  the  planetary  lives  of  Years,  Months,  Days,  and 
Hours.' 

Hence  the  affirmation : 

'For  all  are  Men  in  Eternity,  Rivers,    Mountains, 
Cities,  Villages ' ; 

and  the  voice  of  London  saying  : 

'My  Streets  are  my  Ideas  of  Imagination.' 

Hence  the  parallels  and  correspondences, 
the  names  too  well  known  to  have  any 
ready-made  meaning  to  the  emotions  (Lon- 
don or  Bath),  the  names  so  wholly  unknown 


170  WILLIAM  BLAKE 

that  they  also  could  mean  nothing  to  the 
emotions  or  to  the  memory  (Bowlahoola, 
Golgonooza),  the  whole  unhuman  mythology, 
abstractions  of  frigid  fire.  In  Jerusalem 
Blake  interrupts  himself  to  say  : 

'  I  call  them  by  their  English  names ;    English,  the 

rough  basement. 
Los  built  the  stubborn  structure  of  the  Language, 

acting  against 

Albion's   melancholy,   who   must   else   have   been   a 
Dumb  despair.' 

In  the  Prophetic  Books  we  see  Blake 
labouring  upon  a  *  rough  basement '  of 
'  stubborn '  English ;  is  it,  after  all  this 
1  consolidated  and  extended  work/  this 
'  energetic  exertion  of  his  talent,'  a  building 
set  up  in  vain,  the  attempt  to  express  what 
must  else  have  been,  and  must  now  for  ever 
remain,  '  a  dumb  despair '  ? 

I  think  we  must  take  the  Prophetic  Books 
not  quite  as  Blake  would  have  had  us  take 
them.  He  was  not  a  systematic  thinker, 
and  he  was  not  content  to  be  a  lyric  poet. 
Nor  indeed  did  he  ever  profess  to  offer  us 
a  system,  built  on  logic  and  propped  by 
reasoning,  but  a  myth,  which  is  a  poetical 
creation.  He  said  in  Jerusalem  : 


WILLIAM  BLAKE  171 

'  I  must  Create  a  System,  or  be  enslaved  by  another 

Man's. 

I  will  not  Reason  or  Compare :  my  business  is  to 
Create.' 

To  Blake  each  new  aspect  of  truth  came  as 
a  divine  gift,  and  between  all  his  affirma- 
tions of  truth  there  is  no  contradiction,  or 
no  other  than  that  vital  contradiction  of 
opposites  equally  true.  The  difficulty  lies 
in  co-ordinating  them  into  so  minutely 
articulated  a  myth,  and  the  difficulty  is 
increased  when  we  possess,  instead  of  the 
whole  body  of  the  myth,  only  fragments  of 
it.  Of  the  myth  itself  it  must  be  said  that, 
whether  from  defects  inherent  in  it  or  from 
the  fragmentary  state  in  which  it  comes  to 
us,  it  can  never  mean  anything  wholly 
definite  or  satisfying  even  to  those  minds 
best  prepared  to  receive  mystical  doctrine. 
We  cannot  read  the  Prophetic  Books  either 
for  their  thought  only  or  for  their  beauty 
only.  Yet  we  shall  find  in  them  both 
inspired  thought  and  unearthly  beauty. 
With  these  two  things,  not  always  found 
together,  we  must  be  content. 

The    Prophetic    Books   bear   witness,   in 
their    own   way,   to   that   great    gospel   of 


172  WILLIAM  BLAKE 

imagination  which  Blake  taught  and  ex- 
emplified. In  Jerusalem  it  is  stated  in  a 
single  sentence :  '  I  know  of  no  other 
Christianity  and  of  no  other  Gospel  than 
the  liberty  both  of  body  and  mind  to  exer- 
cise the  Divine  Arts  of  Imagination :  Im- 
agination, the  real  and  eternal  World  of 
which  this  Vegetable  Universe  is  but  a  faint 
shadow,  and  in  which  we  shall  live  in  our 
Eternal  or  Imaginative  Bodies,  when  these 
Vegetable  Mortal  Bodies  are  no  more.'  '  O 
Human  Imagination,  O  Divine  Body  I 
have  Crucified ! '  he  cries ;  and  he  sees 
continually 

'  Abstract    Philosophy     warring   in    enmity    against 

Imagination, 

Which  is  the  Divine  Body  of  the  Lord  Jesus,  blessed 
for  ever.' 

He  finds  the  England  of  his  time  '  generalis- 
ing Art  and  Science  till  Art  and  Science  is 
lost,'  making 

'  A  pretence  of  Art,  to  destroy  Art,  a  pretence  of 

Liberty 

To  destroy  Liberty,  a  pretence  of  Religion  to  destroy 
Religion.' 

He  sees  that 


WILLIAM  BLAKE  173 

'  The  Visions  of  Eternity,  by  reason  of  narrowed  per- 
ceptions, 

Are  become  weak  visions  of  Time  and  Space,  fix'd 
into  furrows  of  death.' 

He  sees  everywhere  '  the  indefinite  Spectre, 
who  is  the  Rational  Power,'  crying  out : 

'  I  am  God,  O  Sons  of  Men !     I   am  your  Eational 

Power ! 
Am  I  not  Bacon  and  Newton  and  Locke  who  teach 

Humility  to  Man  1 
Who  teach  Doubt  and   Experiment :   and   my  two 

kings,  Voltaire,  Eousseau.' 

He  sees  this  threefold  spirit  of  doubt  and 
negation  overspreading  the  earth,  '  brooding 
Abstract  Philosophy/  destroying  Imagina- 
tion ;  and,  as  he  looked  about  him, 

*  Every  Universal  Form  was  become  barren  mountains 

of  Moral 
Virtue :  and  every  Minute  Particular  harden'd  into 

grains  of  sand : 
And  all  the  tenderness  of  the  soul  cast  forth  as  filth 

and  mire.' 

It  is  against  this  spiritual  deadness  that 
he  brings  his  protest,  which  is  to  awaken 
Albion  out  of  the  sleep  of  death,  '  his  long 
and  cold  repose.'  '  Therefore  Los,'  the  spirit 
of  prophecy,  and  thus  Blake,  who  '  kept  the 


174  WILLIAM   BLAKE 

Divine  Vision  in  time  of  trouble,'  stands  in 
London  building  Golgonooza,  '  the  spiritual 
fourfold  London/  the  divine  City  of  God. 
Of  the  real  or  earthly  London  he  says  in 
Jerusalem  : 

1 1  see  London  blind  and  age  bent  begging  thro'  the 

Streets 

Of  Babylon,  led  by  a  child,  his  tears  run  down  his 
beard ! ' 

Babylon,  in  Blake,  means  *  Rational  Mor- 
ality.' In  the  Songs  of  Innocence  we  shall 
see  the  picture,  at  the  head  of  the  poem 
called  '  London.'  In  that  poem  Blake  num- 
bers the  cries  which  go  up  in  '  London's 
chartered  streets,'  the  cry  of  the  chimney- 
sweeper, of  the  soldier,  of  the  harlot ;  and 
he  says  : 

'  In  every  cry  of  every  man, 
In  every  infant's  cry  of  fear, 
In  every  voice,  in  every  ban, 
The  mind-forged  manacles  I  hear.' 

Into  these  lines  he  condenses  much  of  his 
gospel.  What  Blake  most  hated  on  earth 
were  'mind-forged  manacles.'  Reason  seemed 
to  him  to  have  laid  its  freezing  and  fetter- 
ing hand  on  every  warm  joy,  on  every 


WILLIAM  BLAKE  175 

natural  freedom,  of  body  and  soul ;  all  his 
wrath  went  out  against  the  forgers  and  the 
binders  of  these  fetters.  In  his  earlier 
poems  he  sings  the  instinctive  joys  of 
innocence ;  in  his  later,  the  wise  joys  of 
experience ;  and  all  the  Prophetic  Books  are 
so  many  songs  of  mental  liberty  and  invec- 
tives against  every  form  of  mental  oppres- 
sion. 'And  Jerusalem  is  called  Liberty 
among  the  Children  of  Albion.'  One  of  the 
Prophetic  Books,  Ahania,  can  be  condensed 
into  a  single  sentence,  one  of  its  lines  :  '  Truth 
has  bounds  ;  Error  has  none.'  Yet  this  must 
be  understood  to  mean  that  error  is  the 
'  indefinite  void '  and  truth  a  thing  minutely 
organised ;  not  that  truth  can  endure  bond- 
age or  limitation  from  without.  He  typifies 
Moral  Law  by  Bahab,  the  harlot  of  the 
Bible,  a  being  of  hidden,  hypocritic  cruelty. 
Chastity  is  no  more  in  itself  than  a  lure  of 
the  harlot,  typifying  unwilling  restraint,  a 
negation,  and  no  personal  form  of  energy. 

'  No  individual  can  keep  the  Laws,  for  they  are  death 
To  every  energy  of  man,   and  forbid   the   springs 
of  life.' 

It  is  energy  that  is  virtue,  and,  above  all, 


176  WILLIAM  BLAKE 

mental  energy.  '  The  treasures  of  heaven 
are  not  negations  of  passion,  but  realities 
of  intellect,  from  which  all  the  passions 
emanate,  uncurbed  in  their  eternal  glory.' 
'  It  was  the  tree  of  the  knowledge  of  good 
and  evil  that  brought  sin  into  the  world  by 
creating  distinctions,  by  calling  this  good 
and  that  evil.'  Blake  says  in  Jerusalem  : 

'  And  in  this  manner  of  the  Sons  of  Albion  in  their 

strength ; 

They  take  the  Two  Contraries  which  are  called  Quali- 
ties, with  which 
Every  Substance  is  clothed,  they  name  them  Good  and 

Evil, 

From  them  they  make  an  Abstract,  which  is  a  Negation 
Not  only  of  the  Substance  from  which  it  is  derived, 
A  murderer  of  its  own  Body  :  but  also  a  murderer 
Of  every  Divine  Member :  it  is  the  Reasoning  Power, 
An  Abstract  objecting  power,  that  Negatives  every- 
thing. 
This  is  the  Spectre  of   Man :   the   Holy  Reasoning 

Power, 

And  in  its  Holiness  is  closed  the  Abomination  of 
Desolation.' 

The  active  form  of  sin  is  judgment,  intel- 
lectual cruelty,  unforgivingness,  punishment. 
'  In  Hell  is  all  self-righteousness  ;  there  is 
no  such  thing  as  forgiveness  of  sins.'  In 


WILLIAM  BLAKE  177 

his  picture  of  the  'Last  Judgment'  he  repre- 
sents the  Furies  by  men,  not  women ;  and 
for  this  reason  :  '  The  spectator  may  suppose 
them  clergymen  in  the  pulpit,  scourging  sin 
instead  of  forgiving  it.'  In  Jerusalem  he 
says  : 

'  And   the   appearance   of   a    Man   was   seen   in   the 

Furnaces, 
Saving  those  who  have  sinned  from  the  punishment 

of  the  Law 
(In   pity    of    the  punisher  whose  state   is  eternal 

death), 
And  keeping  them  from  Sin  by  the  mild  counsels  of 

his  love.' 

And  in  his  greatest  paradox  and  deepest 
passion  of  truth,  he  affirms  : 

'  I  care  not  whether  a  Man  is  Good  or  Evil ;  all  that  I 

care 
Is  whether  he  is  a  Wise  Man  or  a  Fool.     Go,  put  off 

Holiness 
And  put  on  Intellect.' 

That  holiness  may  be  added  to  wisdom 
Blake  asks  only  that  continual  forgiveness 
of  sins  which  to  him  meant  understanding, 
and  thus  intellectual  sympathy ;  and  he  sees 
in  the  death  of  Jesus  the  supreme  symbol  of 
this  highest  mental  state. 

M 


178  WILLIAM  BLAKE 

'  And  if  God  dieth  not  for  Man  and  giveth  not  himself 
Eternally  for  Man,  Man  could  not  exist,  for  Man  is  love, 
As  God  is  Love  :  every  kindness  to  another  is  a  little 

Death 
In  the   Divine  Image,  nor  can   Man   exist   but  by 

Brotherhood.' 

Of  Blake  it  may  be  said  as  he  says  of 
Albion :  '  He  felt  that  Love  and  Pity  are 
the  same/  and  to  Love  and  Pity  he  gave 
the  ultimate  jurisdiction  over  humanity. 

Blake's  gospel  of  forgiveness  rests  on  a 
very  elaborate  structure,  which  he  has  built 
up  in  his  doctrine  of  '  States/  At  the  head 
of  the  address  to  the  Deists  in  the  third 
chapter  of  Jerusalem,  he  has  written  :  '  The 
Spiritual  States  of  the  Soul  are  all  Eternal. 
Distinguish  between  the  Man  and  his  pre- 
sent State.'  Much  of  his  subtlest  casuistry 
is  expended  on  this  distinction,  and,  as  he 
makes  it,  it  is  profoundly  suggestive.  Erin 
says,  in  Jerusalem : 

'  Learn  therefore,  0  Sisters,  to  distinguish  the  Eternal 

Human 
That  walks  about  among  the  stones  of  fire,  in  bliss 

and  woe 
Alternate,  from  those  States  or  Worlds  in  which  the 

Spirit  travels : 
This  is  the  only  means  to  Forgiveness  of  Enemies.' 


WILLIAM  BLAKE  179 

The  same  image  is  used  again  : 

'  As  the  Pilgrim  passes  while  the  Country  permanent 

remains, 

So  Men  pass  on ;  but  States  remain  permanent  for 
ever ' ; 

and,  again,  in  almost  the  same  words,  in  the 
prose  fragment  on  the  picture  of  the  '  Last 
Judgment '  :  '  Man  passes  on,  but  states 
remain  for  ever ;  he  passes  through  them 
like  a  traveller,  who  may  as  well  suppose 
that  the  places  he  has  passed  through  exist 
no  more,  as  a  man  may  suppose  that  the 
states  he  has  passed  through  exist  no  more : 
everything  is  eternal.'  By  states  Blake 
means  very  much  what  we  mean  by  moods, 
which,  in  common  with  many  mystics,  he 
conceives  as  permanent  spiritual  forces, 
through  which  what  is  transitory  in  man 
passes,  while  man  imagines  that  they,  more 
transitory  than  himself,  are  passing  through 
him.  It  is  from  this  conception  of  man  as 
a  traveller,  and  of  good  and  evil,  the  pas- 
sions and  virtues  and  sensations  and  ideas 
of  man,  as  spiritual  countries,  eternally  re- 
maining, through  which  he  passes,  that 
Blake  draws  his  inference  :  condemn,  if  you 


180  WILLIAM  BLAKE 

will,  the  state  which  you  call  sin,  but  do 
not  condemn  the  individual  whose  passage 
through  it  may  be  a  necessity  of  his  journey. 
And  his  litany  is  : 

'  Descend,  O  Lamb  of  God,  and  take  away  the  imputa- 
tion of  Sin 

By  the  creation  of  States  and  the  deliverance  of 
Individuals  evermore.  Amen.  .  .  . 

Come  then,  0  Lamb  of  God,  and  take  away  the 
remembrance  of  Sin.' 


WILLIAM  BLAKE  181 


VIII 

BLAKE  had  already  decided  to  leave  Felp- 
ham,  'with  the  full  approbation  of  Mr. 
Hayley,'  as  early  as  April  1803.  *  But 
alas  ! '  he  writes  to  Butts,  '  now  I  may  say 
to  you — what  perhaps  I  should  not  dare  to 
say  to  any  one  else — that  I  can  alone  carry 
on  my  visionary  studies  in  London  un- 
annoyed,  and  that  I  may  converse  with 
my  friends  in  eternity,  see  visions,  dream 
dreams,  and  prophesy,  and  speak  parables 
unobserved,  and  at  liberty  from  the  doubts 
of  other  mortals.'  '  There  is  no  medium  or 
middle  state,'  he  adds,  '  and  if  a  man  is  the 
enemy  of  my  spiritual  life  while  he  pretends 
to  be  the  friend  of  my  corporeal,  he  is  a  real 
enemy.'  Hayley,  once  fully  realised,  had 
to  be  shaken  off,  and  we  find  Blake  taking 
rooms  on  the  first-floor  at  17  South  Molton 
Street,  and  preparing  to  move  to  London, 
when  an  incident  occurs  which  leaves  him, 


182  WILLIAM  BLAKE 

as  he  put  it  in  a  letter  to  Butts,  '  in  a  bustle 
to  defend  myself  against  a  very  unwarrant- 
able warrant  from  a  justice  of  the  peace  in 
Chichester,  which  was  taken  out  against  me 
by  a  private  in  Captain  Leathes'  troop  of 
1st  or  Royal  Dragoon  Guards,  for  an  assault 
and  seditious  words.'  This  was  a  soldier 
whom  Blake  had  turned  out  of  his  garden, 
'  perhaps  foolishly  and  perhaps  not,'  as  he 
said,  but  with  unquestionable  vigour.  '  It 
is  certain,'  he  commented,  '  that  a  too  pas- 
sive manner,  inconsistent  with  my  active 
physiognomy,  had  done  me  much  mischief.' 
The  '  contemptible  business '  was  tried  at 
Chichester  on  January  11,  1804,  at  the 
Quarter  Sessions,  and  Blake  was  acquitted 
of  the  charge  of  high  treason ;  '  which  so 
gratified  the  auditory,'  says  the  Sussex 
Advertiser  of  the  date,  '  that  the  court  was, 
in  defiance  of  all  decency,  thrown  into  an 
uproar  by  their  noisy  exultations.' 

London,  on  his  return  to  it,  seemed  to 
Blake  as  desirable  as  Felpham  had  seemed 
after  London  ;  and  he  writes  to  Hayley  : 
'  The  shops  in  London  improve  ;  everything 
is  elegant,  clean,  and  neat ;  the  streets  are 
widened  where  they  were  narrow ;  even 


WILLIAM  BLAKE  183 

Snow  Hill  is  become  almost  level  and  is  a 
very  handsome  street,  and  the  narrow  part 
of  the  Strand  near  St.  Clement's  is  widened 
and  become  very  elegant.'  But  there  were 
other  reasons  for  satisfaction.  In  a  letter 
written  before  he  left  Felpham,  Blake  said  : 
'  What  is  very  pleasant,  every  one  who  hears 
of  my  going  to  London  applauds  it  as  the 
only  course  for  the  interest  of  all  concerned 
in  my  works  ;  observing  that  I  ought  not 
to  be  away  from  the  opportunities  London 
affords  of  seeing  fine  pictures,  and  the 
various  improvements  in  works  of  art  going 
on  in  London/  In  October  1804  he  writes 
to  Hayley,  in  the  most  ecstatic  of  his 
letters,  recording  the  miracle  or  crisis  that 
has  suddenly  opened  his  eyes,  vitalising  the 
meditations  of  Felpham.  '  Suddenly,'  says 
the  famous  letter,  '  on  the  day  after  visiting 
the  Truchsessian  Gallery  of  pictures,  I  was 
again  enlightened  with  the  light  I  enjoyed 
in  my  youth,  and  which  has  for  exactly 
twenty  years  been  closed  from  me  as  by 
a  door  and  by  window-shutters.  .  .  .  Dear 
Sir,  excuse  my  enthusiasm,  or  rather  mad- 
ness, for  I  am  really  drunk  with  intellectual 
vision  whenever  I  take  a  pencil  or  graver 


184  WILLIAM   BLAKE 

into  my  hand,  even  as  I  used  to  be  in  my 
youth,  and  as  I  have  not  been  for  twenty 
dark,  but  very  profitable  years.'  Some  of 
this  new  radiance  may  be  seen  in  the  water- 
colour  of  '  The  River  of  Life,'  which  has 
been  assigned  by  Mr.  Russell  to  this  year ; 
and  in  those  '  Inventions  '  in  illustration  of 
Blair's  Grave,  by  which  Blake  was  to  make 
his  one  appeal  to  the  public  of  his  time. 

That  appeal  he  made  through  the  trea- 
cherous services  of  a  sharper  named  Cro- 
mek,  an  engraver  and  publisher  of  prints, 
who  bought  the  twelve  drawings  for  the  price 
of  twenty  pounds,  on  the  understanding  that 
they  were  to  be  engraved  by  their  designer ; 
and  thereupon  handed  them  over  to  the 
fashionable  Schiavonetti,  telling  Blake  'your 
drawings  have  had  the  good  fortune  to  be 
engraved  by  one  of  the  first  artists  in 
Europe.'  He  further  caused  a  difference 
between  Blake  and  Stothard  which  destroyed 
a  friendship  of  nearly  thirty  years,  never 
made  up  in  the  lifetime  of  either,  though 
Blake  made  two  efforts  to  be  reconciled. 
The  story  of  the  double  commission  given  by 
Cromek  for  a  picture  of  Chaucer's  Canter- 
bury Pilgrims,  and  of  the  twofold  accusation 


WILLIAM  BLAKE  185 

of  plagiarism,  is  told  clearly  enough  in  the 
narrative  of  J.  T.  Smith  (p.  368  below),  while 
Cunningham  does  his  best  to  confuse  the 
facts  in  the  interests  of  Cromek.  It  has 
been  finally  summed  up  by  Mr.  Swinburne, 
who  comes  to  this  reasonable  conclusion  : 
'It  is  probable  that  Stothard  believed 
himself  to  be  not  in  the  wrong  ;  it  is  certain 
that  Blake  was  in  the  right/  As  for  Cromek, 
he  has  written  himself  down  for  all  time  in 
his  true  character,  naked  and  not  ashamed, 
in  a  letter  to  Blake  of  May  1807,  where  the 
false  bargainer  asserts  :  '  Herein  I  have  been 
gratified  ;  for  I  was  determined  to  bring  you 
food  as  well  as  reputation,  though,  from  your 
late  conduct,  I  have  some  reason  to  embrace 
your  wild  opinion,  that  to  manage  genius, 
and  to  cause  it  to  produce  good  things,  it  is 
absolutely  necessary  to  starve  it ;  indeed, 
the  opinion  is  considerably  heightened  by 
the  recollection  that  your  best  work,  the 
illustrations  of  The  Grave,  was  produced 
when  you  and  Mrs.  Blake  were  reduced  so 
low  as  to  be  obliged  to  live  on  half  a  guinea 
a  week.'  Cromek  published  the  book  by 
subscription  in  August  1808,  with  an 
'  advertisement '  invoking  the  approval  of 


186  WILLIAM  BLAKE 

the  drawings  as  '  a  high  and  original  effort 
of  genius'  by  eleven  Royal  Academicians, 
including  Benjamin  West,  Flaxman,  Law- 
rence, and  Stothard.  '  To  the  elegant  and 
classical  taste  of  Mr.  Fuseli,'  he  tells  us 
further,  'he  is  indebted  for  the  excellent 
remarks  on  the  moral  worth  and  picturesque 
dignity  of  the  Designs  that  accompany 
this  Poem.'  Fuseli  praises  pompously  the 
'  genuine  and  unaffected  attitudes,'  the 
'  simple  graces  which  nature  and  the  heart 
alone  can  dictate,  and  only  an  eye  inspired 
by  both,  discover,'  though  finding  the  artist 
'  playing  on  the  very  verge  of  legitimate 
invention.' 

It  is  by  the  designs  to  Blair's  Grave  that 
Blake  is  still  perhaps  chiefly  known,  outside 
his  own  public ;  nor  was  he  ever  so  clear, 
or,  in  a  literal  way,  so  convincing  in  his 
rendering  of  imaginative  reality.  Some- 
thing formal  tempers  and  makes  the  ecstasy 
explicit ;  the  drawing  is  inflexibly  elegant ; 
all  the  Gothic  secrets  that  had  been  learnt 
among  the  tombs  in  Westminster  Abbey 
find  their  way  into  these  stony  and  yet 
strangely  living  death-beds  and  monuments 
of  death.  No  more  vehement  movement 


WILLIAM  BLAKE  187 

was  ever  perpetrated  than  that  leap  together 
of  the  soul  and  body  meeting  as  the  grave 
opens.  If  ever  the  soul  was  made  credible 
to  the  mind  through  the  eyes,  it  is  in  these 
designs  carved  out  of  abstract  form,  and 
planned  according  to  a  logic  which  is  partly 
literal  faith  in  imagination  and  partly  the 
curtailment  of  scholastic  drawing. 

The  book  contains  the  names  of  more  than 
five  hundred  subscribers,  but  only  one  con- 
temporary notice  has  been  found,  a  notice  of 
two  columns,  mere  drivel  and  mere  raving, 
signed  by  the  happily  undiscovered  initials 
R.  H. ,  in  the  thirty-second  number  of  Leigh 
Hunt's  paper,  The  Examiner  (August  7, 
1808,  pp.  509,  510).  It  is  under  the 
heading  '  Fine  Arts,'  and  is  called  '  Blake's 
edition  of  Blair's  Grave.'  The  notice  is 
rendered  specially  grotesque  by  its  serious 
air  of  arguing  with  what  it  takes  to  be 
absurdity  coupled  with  '  an  appearance  of 
libidinousness '  which  '  intrudes  itself  upon 
the  holiness  of  our  thoughts  and  counteracts 
their  impression.'  Like  most  moralists  of 
the  press,  this  critic's  meaning  is  hard  to 
get  at.  Here,  however,  is  a  specimen : 
'  But  a  more  serious  censure  attaches  to 


188  WILLIAM   BLAKE 

two  of  these  most  heterogeneous  and  serio- 
fantastic  designs.  At  the  awful  day  of 
judgment,  before  the  throne  of  God  himself, 
a  male  and  female  figure  are  described  in 
most  indecent  attitudes.  It  is  the  same 
with  the  salutation  of  a  man  and  his  wife 
meeting  in  the  pure  mansions  of  Heaven.' 
Thus  sanctified  a  voice  was  it  that  first 
croaked  at  Blake  out  of  the  '  nest  of  villains ' 
which  he  imagined  that  he  was  afterwards 
to  '  root  out '  of  The  Examiner. 

A  quite  different  view  of  him  is  to  be 
found  in  a  book  which  was  published  before 
the  Grave  actually  came  out,  though  it 
contains  a  reference  to  the  designs  and  to 
the  *  ardent  and  encomiastic  applause '  of 
'  some  of  the  first  artists  in  the  country.' 
The  book,  which  contained  an  emblematic 
frontispiece  designed  by  Blake  and  engraved 
by  Cromek,  was  A  Fathers  Memoirs  of  his 
Child,  written  by  Benjamin  Heath  Malkin, 
then  headmaster  of  Bury  Grammar  School, 
in  which  the  father  gives  a  minute  and 
ingenuous  account  of  his  child,  a  prodigy  of 
precocious  intellect,  who  died  at  the  age  of 
nearly  seven  years.  The  child  was  accus- 
tomed to  do  little  drawings,  some  of  which 


WILLIAM  BLAKE  189 

are  reproduced  in  the  book  in  facsimile,  and 
the  father,  after  giving  his  own  opinion  of 
them,  adds  :  '  Yet,  as  my  panegyric  on  such 
a  subject  can  carry  with  it  no  recommenda- 
tion, I  subjoin  the  testimony  of  Mr.  Blake 
to  this  instance  of  peculiar  ingenuity,  who 
has  given  me  his  opinion  of  these  various 
performances  in  the  following  terms  : — 

'  "  They  are  all  firm,  determinate  outlines, 
or  identical  form.  Had  the  hand  which 
executed  these  little  ideas  been  that  of  a 
plagiary,  who  works  only  from  the  memory, 
we  should  have  seen  blots,  called  masses ; 
blots  without  form,  and  therefore  without 
meaning.  These  blots  of  light  and  dark,  as 
being  the  result  of  labour,  are  always  clumsy 
and  indefinite ;  the  effect  of  rubbing  out 
and  putting  in,  like  the  progress  of  a  blind 
man,  or  of  one  in  the  dark,  who  feels  his 
way,  but  does  not  see  it.  These  are  not  so. 
Even  the  copy  of  Raphael's  cartoon  of 
St.  Paul  preaching  is  a  firm,  determinate 
outline,  struck  at  once,  as  Protogenes  struck 
his  line,  when  he  meant  to  make  himself 
known  to  Apelles.  The  map  of  Allestone 
has  the  same  character  of  the  firm  and 
determinate.  All  his  efforts  prove  this 


190  WILLIAM   BLAKE 

little  boy  to  have  had  that  greatest  of  all 
blessings,  a  strong  imagination,  a  clear  idea, 
and  a  determinate  vision  of  things  in  his 
own  mind.'  It  is  in  the  lengthy  dedication 
of  the  book  to  Thomas  Johnes,  the  trans- 
lator of  Froissart,  that  Dr.  Malkin  gives  the 
very  interesting  personal  account  of  Blake 
which  is  reprinted  on  p.  307  below. 

It  is  not  certain  whether  Blake  had  ever 
known  little  Thomas  Malkin,  and  it  would 
be  interesting  to  know  whether  it  was 
through  any  actual  influence  of  his  that  the 
child  had  come  to  his  curious  invention  of 
an  imaginary  country.  He  drew  the  map 
of  this  country,  peopled  with  names  (Nob- 
blede  and  Bobblobb,  Punchpeach  and 
Closetha)  scarcely  more  preposterous  than 
the  names  which  Blake  was  just  then  dis- 
covering for  his  own  spiritual  regions,  wrote 
its  chronicles,  and  even  made  music  for  it. 
The  child  was  born  in  1795  and  died  in 
1802,  and  Blake  had  been  at  Felpham  since 
September  1800;  but,  if  they  had  met 
before  that  date,  there  was  quite  time  for 
Blake's  influence  to  have  shown  itself.  In 
1799  the  astonishing  child  '  could  read, 
without  hesitation,  any  English  book.  He 


WILLIAM  BLAKE  191 

could  spell  any  words.  .  .  .  He  knew  the 
Greek  alphabet ' ;  and  on  his  fourth  birth- 
day, in  that  year,  he  writes  to  his  mother 
saying  that  he  has  got  a  Latin  grammar  and 
English  prints.  In  October  1800  he  says  : 
'  I  know  a  deal  of  Latin/  and  in  December 
he  is  reading  Burns's  poems,  'which  I  am 
very  fond  of.'  Influence  or  accident,  the 
coincidence  is  singular,  and  at  least  shows 
us  something  in  Blake's  brain  working  like 
the  brain  of  a  precocious  child. 

In  1806  Blake  wrote  a  generous  and 
vigorous  letter  to  the  editor  of  the  Monthly 
Review  (July  1,  1806)  in  reply  to  a  criticism 
which  had  appeared  in  Sell's  Weekly  Mes- 
senger on  Fuseli's  picture  of  Count  Ugolino 
in  the  Royal  Academy.  In  1808  he  had 
himself,  and  for  the  fifth  and  last  time,  two 
pictures  in  the  Academy,  and  in  that  year 
he  wrote  the  letter  to  Ozias  Humphrey, 
describing  one  of  his  many  'Last  Judgments,' 
which  is  given,  with  a  few  verbal  errors,  by 
J.  T.  Smith.  In  December  he  wrote  to 
George  Cumberland,  who  had  written  to 
order  for  a  friend  'a  complete  set  of  all 
you  have  published  in  the  way  of  books 
coloured  as  mine  are,'  that '  new  varieties,  or 


192  WILLIAM  BLAKE 

rather  new  pleasures,  occupy  my  thoughts ; 
new  profits  seem  to  arise  before  me  so 
tempting  that  I  have  already  involved 
myself  in  engagements  that  preclude  all 
possibility  of  promising  anything/  Does 
this  refer  to  the  success  of  Blair's  Grave, 
which  had  just  been  published  ?  He  goes 
on :  'I  have,  however,  the  satisfaction  to 
inform  you  that  I  have  myself  begun  to 
print  an  account  of  my  various  inventions 
in  Art,  for  which  I  have  procured  a  pub- 
lisher, and  am  determined  to  pursue  the 
plan  of  publishing,  that  I  may  get  printed 
without  disarranging  my  time,  which  in 
future  must  alone  be  designing  and  paint- 
ing.' To  this  project,  which  was  never 
carried  out,  he  refers  again  in  the  prospectus 
printed  in  anticipation  of  his  exhibition,  a 
copy  of  which,  given  to  Ozias  Humphreys, 
exists  with  the  date  May  15,  1809.  A 
second  prospectus  is  given  by  Gilchrist  as 
follows : — 

'  Blake's  Chaucer,  the  Canterbury  Pil- 
grims. This  Fresco  Picture,  representing 
Chaucer's  Characters,  painted  by  William 
Blake,  as  it  is  now  submitted  to  the  public. 

'  The  designer  proposes  to  engrave  in  a 


WILLIAM  BLAKE  193 

correct  and  finished  line  manner  of  engrav- 
ing, similar  to  those  original  copper-plates 
of  Albert  Durer,  Lucas  Van  Leyden,  Aide- 
grave,  and  the  old  original  engravers,  who 
were  great  masters  in  painting  and  design- 
ing; whose  methods  alone  can  delineate 
Character  as  it  is  in  this  Picture,  where 
all  the  lineaments  are  distinct. 

'  It  is  hoped  that  the  Painter  will  be 
allowed  by  the  public  (notwithstanding 
artfully  disseminated  insinuations  to  the 
contrary)  to  be  better  able  than  any  other 
to  keep  his  own  characters  and  expressions ; 
having  had  sufficient  evidence  in  the  works 
of  our  own  Hogarth,  that  no  other  artist 
can  reach  the  original  spirit  so  well  as  the 
Painter  himself,  especially  as  Mr.  B.  is  an 
old,  well-known,  and  acknowledged  graver. 

'  The  size  of  the  engraving  will  be  three  feet 
one  inch  long  by  one  foot  high.  The  artist 
engages  to  deliver  it,  finished,  in  one  year 
from  September  next.  No  work  of  art  can 
take  longer  than  a  year :  it  may  be  worked 
backwards  and  forwards  without  end,  and 
last  a  man's  whole  life ;  but  he  will,  at 
length,  only  be  forced  to  bring  it  back  to 
what  it  was,  and  it  will  be  worse  than  it 

N 


194  WILLIAM   BLAKE 

was  at  the  end  of  the  first  twelve  months. 
The  value  of  this  artist's  year  is  the  criterion 
of  Society  ;  and  as  it  is  valued,  so  does 
Society  flourish  or  decay. 

'  The  price  to  Subscribers,  Four  Guineas  ; 
two  to  be  paid  at  the  time  of  subscribing, 
the  other  two,  on  delivery  of  the  print. 

'  Subscriptions  received  at  No.  28,  corner 
of  Broad  Street,  Golden  Square,  where  the 
Picture  is  now  exhibiting,  among  other 
works,  by  the  same  artist. 

'  The  price  will  be  considerably  raised  to 
non-subscribers.' 

The  exhibition  thus  announced  was  held 
at  the  house  of  James  Blake,  and  contained 
sixteen  pictures,  of  which  the  first  nine  are 
described  as  '  Frescoes '  or  '  experiment 
pictures,'  and  the  remaining  seven  as  '  draw- 
ings,' that  is,  drawings  in  water-colour.  The 
Catalogue  (which  was  included  in  the  en- 
trance fee  of  half  a  crown)  is  Blake's  most 
coherent  work  in  prose,  and  can  be  read  in 
Gilchrist,  ii.  139-163.  It  is  called  'A 
Descriptive  Catalogue  of  Pictures,  Poetical 
and  Historical  Inventions,  painted  by 
William  Blake,  in  Water-Colours,  being  the 
ancient  Method  of  Fresco  Painting  Re- 


WILLIAM  BLAKE  195 

stored ;  and  Drawings,  for  Public  Inspec- 
tion, and  for  Sale  by  Private  Contract.' 
Crabb  Robinson,  from  whom  we  have  the 
only  detailed  account  of  the  exhibition,  says 
that  the  pictures  filled  '  several  rooms  of  an 
ordinary  dwelling-house '  (see*  p.  283  below). 
He  mentions  Lamb's  delight  in  the  Cata- 
logue,1 and  his  declaring  '  that  Blake's 
description  was  the  finest  criticism  he  had 
ever  read  of  Chaucer's  poem.'  In  that 
letter  to  Bernard  Barton  (May  15,  1824), 
which  is  full  of  vivid  admiration  for  Blake 
('  I  must  look  on  him  as  one  of  the  most 
extraordinary  persons  of  the  age'),  Lamb 
speaks  of  the  criticism  as  '  most  spirited,  but 
mystical  and  full  of  vision,'  and  says  :  '  His 
pictures — one  in  particular,  the  "  Canter- 
bury Pilgrims "  (far  above  Stothard's) — 
have  great  merit,  but  hard,  dry,  yet 
with  grace.'  Southey,  we  know  from  a 
sneer  in  The  Doctor  at  '  that  painter  of 
great  but  insane  genius,  William  Blake,' 
also  went  to  the  exhibition,  and  found,  he 

1  We  know  from  Mr.  Lucas's  catalogue  of  Lamb's  library 
that  Lamb  bound  it  up  in  a  thick  12mo  volume  with  his  own 
Confessions  of  a  Drunkard,  Southey's  Wat  Tyler,  and  Lady 
Winchilsea's  and  Lord  Rochester's  poems. 


196  WILLIAM  BLAKE 

tells  us,  the  picture  of '  The  Ancient  Britons/ 
'  one  of  the  worst  pictures,  which  is  saying 
much.'  A  note  to  Mr.  Swinburne's  William 
Blake  tells  us  that  in  the  competent  opinion 
of  Mr.  Seymour  Kirkup  this  picture  was 
'the  very  noblest  of  all  Blake's  works.'  It 
is  now  lost ;  it  was  probably  Blake's  largest 
work,  the  figures,  Blake  asserts,  being  '  full 
as  large  as  life.'  Of  the  other  pictures  the 
seventh,  eighth,  ninth,  tenth,  and  sixteenth 
are  lost ;  the  ninth  exists  in  a  replica  in 
'  fresco/  and  the  sixteenth  in  what  is  pro- 
bably a  first  sketch. 

Blake's  reason  for  giving  this  exhibition 
was  undoubtedly  indignation  at  what  he 
took  to  be  Stothard's  treachery  in  the 
matter  of  the  'Canterbury  Pilgrims.'  This 
picture  (now  in  the  National  Gallery,  No. 
1163)  had  been  exhibited  by  Cromek 
throughout  the  kingdom,  and  he  had  an- 
nounced effusively,  in  a  seven  page  adver- 
tisement at  the  end  of  Blair's  Grave,  the 
issue  of '  a  print  executed  in  the  line  manner 
of  engraving,  and  in  the  same  excellent 
style  as  the  portrait  of  Mr.  William  Blake, 
prefixed  to  this  work,  by  Louis  Schiavonetti, 
Esq.,  V.A.,  the  gentleman  who  has  etched 


WILLIAM  BLAKE  197 

the  prints  that  at  once  illustrate  and  em- 
bellish the  present  volume.'  The  Descrip- 
tive Catalogue  is  full  of  angry  scorn  of  '  my 
rival/  as  Blake  calls  Stothard,  and  of  the 
'dumb  dollies'  whom  he  has  'jumbled 
together '  in  his  design,  and  of  Hoppner  for 
praising  them  in  the  letter  quoted  in  the 
advertisement.  '  If  Mr.  B.'s  "  Canterbury 
Pilgrims  "  had  been  done  by  any  other  power 
than  that  of  the  poetic  visionary,  it  would 
have  been  as  dull  as  his  adversary's,'  Blake 
assures  us,  and,  no  doubt,  justly.  The 
general  feeling  of  Blake's  friends,  I  doubt 
not,  is  summed  up  in  an  ill-spelled  letter 
from  young  George  Cumberland  to  his 
father,  written  from  the  Pay  Office,  White- 
hall, October  14,  1809,  which  I  copy  in  all  its 
literal  slovenliness  from  the  letter  preserved 
in  the  Cumberland  Papers :  '  Blakes  has  pub- 
lished a  Catalogue  of  Pictures  being  the 
ancient  method  of  Frescoe  Painting  Re- 
stored, you  should  tell  Mr.  Barry  to  get  it, 
it  may  be  the  means  of  serving  your  friend. 
It  sells  for  2/6  and  may  be  had  of  J.  Blake, 
28  Broad  St.,  Golden  Square,  at  his  Brothers 
— the  Book  is  a  great  curiosity.  He  as 
given  Stothard  a  coinpleet  set  down.' 


198  WILLIAM  BLAKE 

The  Catalogue  is  badly  printed  on  poor 
paper  in  the  form  of  a  small  octavo  book 
of  66  pages.  It  is  full  of  fierce,  exuberant 
wisdom,  which  plunges  from  time  to  time 
into  a  bright,  demonstrative  folly ;  it  is  a 
confession,  a  criticism,  and  a  kind  of  gospel 
of  sanctity  and  honesty  and  imagination  in 
art.  The  whole  thing  is  a  thinking  aloud. 
One  hears  an  impetuous  voice  as  if  saying : 
'  I  have  been  scorned  long  enough  by  these 
fellows,  who  owe  to  me  all  that  they  possess  ; 
it  shall  be  so  no  longer.'  As  he  thinks,  his 
pen  follows;  he  argues  with  foes  actually 
visible  to  him ;  never  does  he  realise  the 
indifferent  public  that  may  glance  at  what 
he  has  written,  and  how  best  to  interest  or 
convince  it  if  it  does.  He  throws  down  a 
challenge,  and  awaits  an  answer. 

What  answer  came  is  rememberable  among 
the  infamies  of  journalism.  Only  one  news- 
paper noticed  the  exhibition,  and  this  was 
again  The  Examiner.  The  notice  appeared 
under  the  title  '  Mr.  Blake's  Exhibition '  in 
No.  90,  September  17,  1809,  pp.  605-6, 
where  it  fills  two  columns.  It  is  unsigned, 
but  there  can  be  no  doubt  that  it  was 
written  by  the  R.  H.  of  the  former  article. 


WILLIAM  BLAKE  199 

The  main  part  of  it  is  taken  up  by  extracts 
from  the  Descriptive  Catalogue,  italicised 
and  put  into  small  capitals  '  to  amuse  the 
reader,  and  satisfy  him  of  the  truth  of  the 
foregoing  remarks.'  This  is  all  that  need 
be  quoted  of  the  foregoing  remarks  : 

'  But  when  the  ebullitions  of  a  distempered 
brain  are  mistaken  for  the  sallies  of  genius 
by  those  whose  works  have  exhibited  the 
soundest  thinking  in  art,  the  malady  has 
indeed  attained  a  pernicious  height,  and  it 
becomes  a  duty  to  endeavour  to  arrest  its 
progress.  Such  is  the  case  with  the  pro- 
ductions and  admirers  of  William  Blake,  an 
unfortunate  lunatic,  whose  personal  inoffen- 
siveness  secures  him  from  confinement,  and, 
consequently,  of  whom  no  public  notice 
would  have  been  taken,  if  he  was  not  forced 
on  the  notice  and  animadversion  of  The 
Examiner,  in  having  been  held  up  to  public 
admiration  by  many  esteemed  amateurs  and 
professors  as  a  genius  in  some  respect 
original  and  legitimate.  The  praises  which 
these  gentlemen  bestowed  last  year  on  this 
unfortunate  man's  illustrations  to  Blair's 
Grave  have,  in  feeding  his  vanity,  stimulated 
him  to  publish  his  madness  more  largely, 


200  WILLIAM  BLAKE 

and  thus  again  exposed  him,  if  not  to  the 
derision,  at  least  to  the  pity  of  the  public. 
.  .  .  Thus  encouraged,  the  poor  man 
fancies  himself  a  great  master,  and  has 
painted  a  few  wretched  pictures,  some  of 
which  are  unintelligible  allegory,  others  an 
attempt  at  sober  character  by  caricature 
representation,  and  the  whole  "  blotted  and 
blurred,"  and  very  badly  drawn.  These  he 
calls  an  Exhibition,  of  which  he  has  pub- 
lished a  Catalogue,  or  rather  a  farrago  of 
nonsense,  unintelligibleness,  and  egregious 
vanity,  the  wild  effusions  of  a  distempered 
brain.  One  of  the  pictures  represents 
Chaucer's  Pilgrims,  and  is  in  every  respect 
a  striking  contrast  to  the  admirable  picture 
of  the  same  subject  by  Mr.  Stothard,  from 
which  an  exquisite  print  is  forthcoming  from 
the  hand  of  Schiavonetti.' 

The  last  great  words  of  the  Catalogue,  *  If 
a  man  is  master  of  his  profession,  he  cannot 
be  ignorant  that  he  is  so ;  and,  if  he  is  not 
employed  by  those  who  pretend  to  encourage 
art,  he  will  employ  himself,  and  laugh  in 
secret  at  the  pretences  of  the  ignorant, 
while  he  has  every  night  dropped  into  his 
shoe,  as  soon  as  he  puts  it  off,  and  puts  out 


WILLIAM  BLAKE  201 

the  candle,  and  gets  into  bed,  a  reward 
for  the  labours  of  the  day  such  as  the  world 
cannot  give,  and  patience  and  time  await 
to  give  him  all  that  the  world  can  give ' : 
those  noble,  lovely,  pathetic  and  prophetic 
words,  are  quoted  at  the  end  of  the  article 
without  comment,  as  if  to  quote  them  was 
enough.  It  was. 

In  1803  William  Blake  sold  to  Thomas 
Butts  eleven  drawings  for  fourteen  guineas. 
In  1903  twelve  water-colour  drawings  in 
illustration  of  L' Allegro  and  II  Penseroso 
were  sold  for  £1960,  and  the  twenty-one 
water-colour  drawings  for  Job  for  £5600. 
These  figures  have  their  significance,  but  the 
significance  must  not  be  taken  to  mean  any 
improvement  in  individual  taste.  When  a 
selection  from  the  pictures  in  the  Butts  col- 
lection was  on  view  at  Sotheby's  I  heard  a 
vulgar  person  with  a  loud  voice,  a  dealer  or 
a  dealer's  assistant,  say  with  a  guffaw :  '  It 
would  make  me  sick  to  have  these  things 
round  my  room/  That  vulgar  person  repre- 
sents the  eternal  taste  of  the  multitude ; 
only,  in  the  course  of  a  hundred  years,  a 
few  men  of  genius  have  repeated  after  one 
another  that  Blake  was  a  man  of  genius,  and 


202  WILLIAM  BLAKE 

their  united  voices  have  carried  further  than 
the  guffaws  of  vulgar  persons,  repeated 
generation  after  generation.  And  so  in  due 
course,  when  Blake  has  been  properly  dead 
long  enough,  there  is  a  little  public  which, 
bidding  against  itself,  gambles  cheerfully  for 
the  possession  of  the  scraps  of  paper  on 
which  he  sent  in  his  account,  against  the 
taste  of  his  age  and  the  taste  of  all  the  ages. 
Blake  himself  had  never  any  doubt  of  his 
own  greatness  as  an  artist,  and  some  of  the 
proud  or  petulant  things  which  he  occasion- 
ally wrote  (the  only  outbreaks  of  impatience 
in  a  life  wholly  given  up  to  unceasing  and 
apparently  unrewarded  labour)  have  been 
quoted  against  him  as  petty  or  unworthy, 
partly  because  they  are  so  uncalculated  and 
so  childlike.  Blake  'bore  witness,'  as  he 
might  have  said,  that  he  had  done  his  duty  : 
'for  that  I  cannot  live  without  doing  my 
duty,  to  lay  up  treasures  in  heaven,  is  cer- 
tain and  determined,'  he  writes  fromFelpham. 
And  he  asserted  the  truth  of  his  own  genius, 
its  truth  in  the  spiritual  sense,  its  divine 
origin,  as  directly  and  as  emphatically  as  he 
asserted  everything  which  he  had  appre- 
hended as  truth.  He  is  merely  stating 


WILLIAM  BLAKE  203 

what  seems  to  him  an  obvious  but  over- 
looked fact  when  he  says :  '  In  Mr.  B.'s 
Britons  the  blood  is  seen  to  circulate  in 
their  limbs :  he  defies  competition  in  colour- 
ing ' ;  and  again  :  '  I  am,  like  other  men, 
just  equal  in  invention  and  execution  of  my 
work/  All  art,  he  had  realised,  which  is 
true  art,  is  equal,  as  every  diamond  is  a 
diamond.  There  is  only  true  and  false  art. 
Thus  when  he  says  in  his  prospectus  of  1793 
that  he  has  been  '  enabled  to  bring  before 
the  Public  works  (he  is  not  afraid  to  say)  of 
equal  magnitude  and  consequence  with  the 
productions  of  any  age  or  country/  he  means 
neither  more  nor  less  than  when  he  says 
in  the  Descriptive  Catalogue  of  1809  :  'He 
knows  that  what  he  does  is  not  inferior  to 
the  grandest  antiques.  Superior  it  cannot 
be,  for  human  power  cannot  go  beyond  either 
what  he  does  or  what  they  have  done ;  it  is 
the  gift  of  God,  it  is  inspiration  and  vision. 
.  .  .  The  human  mind  cannot  go  beyond  the 
gift  of  God,  the  Holy  Ghost.'  It  is  in 
humility  rather  than  in  pride  that  he  equals 
himself  with  those  who  seemed  to  him  the 
genuine  artists,  the  humility  of  a  belief  that 
all  art  is  only  a  portion  of  that  *  Poetic  Genius, 


204  WILLIAM  BLAKE 

which  is  the  Lord/  offered  up  in  homage 
by  man,  and  returning,  in  mere  gratitude, 
to  its  origin.  When  he  says,  '  I  do  not  pre- 
tend to  paint  better  than  Rafael  or  Michael 
Angelo,  or  Julio  Romano,  or  Albert  Durer, 
but  I  do  pretend  to  paint  finer  than  Rubens, 
or  Rembrandt,  or  Titian,  or  Correggio/  he 
merely  means,  in  that  odd  coupling  and 
contrasting  of  names,  to  assert  his  belief 
in  the  supremacy  of  strong,  clear,  masculine 
execution  over  what  seemed  to  him  (to  his 
limited  knowledge,  not  false  instinct)  the 
heresy  and  deceit  of  '  soft  and  effeminate ' 
execution,  the  *  broken  lines,  broken  masses, 
and  broken  colours '  of  the  art  which  '  loses 
form.'  In  standing  up  for  his  ideal  of  art,  he 
stands  up  himself,  like  a  champion.  '  I  am 
hid/  he  writes  on  the  flyleaf  of  Reynolds's 
Discourses,  and,  in  the  last  sentence  of  that 
'  Public  Address '  which  was  never  printed, 
he  declares :  *  Resentment  for  personal  in- 
juries has  had  some  share  in  this  public 
address,  but  love  to  my  art,  and  zeal  for  my 
country,  a  much  greater. '  And  in  the  last  sen- 
tence of  the  Descriptive  Catalogue,  he  sums 
up  the  whole  matter,  so  far  as  it  concerned 
him,  finally,  and  with  a  'sure  and  certain 


WILLIAM   BLAKE  205 

hope '  which,  now  that  it  has  been  realised,  so 
long  afterwards,  comes  to  us  like  a  reproach. 
'  Shall  Painting,'  asks  Blake  in  his  Descrip- 
tive Catalogue,  '  be  confined  to  the  sordid 
drudgery  of  facsimile  representations  of 
merely  mortal  and  perishing  substances,  and 
not  be,  as  poetry  and  music  are,  elevated 
into  its  own  proper  sphere  of  invention  and 
visionary  conception  ?  No,  it  shall  not  be 
so  !  Painting,  as  well  as  poetry  and  music, 
exists  and  exults  in  immortal  thoughts.'  It 
was  to  restore  this  conception  of  art  to  Eng- 
land that  Blake  devoted  his  life.  '  The 
Enquiry  in  England,'  he  said,  in  his  mar- 
ginalia to  Reynolds,  *  is  not  whether  a  Man 
has  Talents  and  Genius,  but  whether  he  is 
Passive  and  Polite  and  a  Virtuous  Ass.' 
He  says  there  :  '  Ages  are  all  Equal,  but 
Genius  is  always  above  the  Age.'  He  looks 
on  Bacon  and  Locke  and  Burke  and  Rey- 
nolds as  men  who  'mock  Inspiration  and 
Vision.'  '  Inspiration  and  Vision,'  he  says, 
'  was  then,  and  now  is,  and  I  hope  will 
always  Remain,  my  Element,  my  Eternal 
Dwelling-place.'  '  The  Ancients  did  not 
mean  to  Impose  when  they  affirmed  their 
belief  in  Vision  and  Revelation.  Plato  was 


206  WILLIAM  BLAKE 

in  Earnest.  Milton  was  in  Earnest.  They 
believed  that  God  did  visit  Man  Really 
and  Truly/  Further,  '  Knowledge  of  Ideal 
Beauty  is  not  to  be  Acquired.  It  is  born 
with  us.  ...  Man  is  Born  Like  a  Garden 
ready  Planted  and  Sown.  This  World  is 
too  poor  to  produce  one  Seed.' 

What  Blake  meant  by  vision,  how  signifi- 
cantly yet  cautiously  he  interchanged  the 
words  '  seen '  and  '  imagined,'  has  been 
already  noted  in  that  passage  of  the  Descrip- 
tive Catalogue,  where  he  answers  his  ob- 
jectors :  '  The  connoisseurs  and  artists  who 
have  made  objections  to  Mr.  B.'s  mode  of 
representing  spirits  with  real  bodies  would 
do  well  to  consider  that  the  Venus,  the 
Minerva,  the  Jupiter,  the  Apollo,  which  they 
admire  in  Greek  statues  are,  all  of  them, 
representations  of  spiritual  existences,  of 
Gods  immortal,  to  the  ordinary  perishing 
organ  of  sight ;  and  yet  they  are  embodied 
and  organised  in  solid  marble.  Mr.  B. 
requires  the  same  latitude,  and  all  is  well.' 
Then  comes  the  great  definition,  which  I 
will  not  repeat :  '  He  who  does  not  imagine 
in  stronger  and  better  lineaments.' 

'  The  world  of  imagination,'  he  says  else- 


WILLIAM  BLAKE  207 

where,  '  is  infinite  and  eternal,  whereas  the 
world  of  generation  or  vegetation  is  finite 
and  temporal.  There  exist  in  that  eternal 
world  the  eternal  realities  of  everything 
which  we  see  reflected  in  this  vegetable 
glass  of  nature.'  What  is  said  here,  trans- 
muted by  an  instinct  wholly  an  artist's  into 
a  great  defence  of  the  reality  of  imagination 
in  art,  is  a  form  of  the  central  doctrine  of 
the  mystics,  formulated  by  Swedenborg  in 
something  very  like  Blake's  language,  though 
with  errors  or  hesitations  which  is  what 
Blake  sets  himself  to  point  out  in  his  mar- 
ginalia to  Swedenborg.  As,  in  those  margin- 
alia, we  see  Blake  altering  every  allusion  to 
God  into  an  allusion  to  '  the  Poetic  Genius,' 
so,  always,  we  shall  find  him  understand- 
ing every  promise  of  Christ,  or  Old  Testa- 
ment prophecy,  as  equally  translatable  into 
terms  of  the  imaginative  life,  into  terms  of 
painting,  poetry,  or  music.  In  the  render- 
ing of  vision  he  required  above  all  things 
that  fidelity  which  can  only  be  obtained 
through  '  minutely  particular '  execution. 
'  Invention  depends  Altogether  upon  Execu- 
tion or  Organisation ;  as  that  is  right  or 
wrong,  so  is  the  Invention  perfect  or  imper- 


208  WILLIAM  BLAKE 

feet.  Whoever  is  set  to  Undermine  the 
Execution  of  Art  is  set  to  destroy  Art. 
Michael  Angelo's  Art  depends  on  Michael 
Angelo's  Execution  Altogether.  .  .  .  He 
who  admires  Rafael  Must  admire  Rafael's 
Execution.  He  who  does  not  admire 
Rafael's  Execution  can  not  admire  Rafael.' 
Finally,  '  the  great  and  golden  rule  of 
art  as  well  as  of  life/  he  says  in  the 
Descriptive  Catalogue,  f  is  this :  that  the 
more  distinct,  sharp,  and  wiry  the  bounding 
line,  the  more  perfect  the  work  of  art ;  and 
the  less  keen  and  sharp,  the  greater  is  the 
evidence  of  weak  imagination,  plagiarism, 
and  bungling.  .  .  .  What  is  it  that  dis- 
tinguishes honesty  from  knavery,  but  the 
hard  and  wiry  line  of  rectitude  and  certainty 
in  the  actions  and  intentions?  Leave  out 
this  line,  and  you  leave  out  life  itself.  All 
is  chance  again,  and  the  line  of  the  Almighty 
must  be  drawn  out  upon  it  again,  before 
man  or  beast  can  exist.' 

In  Blake's  work  a  great  fundamental  con- 
ception is  rarely  lacking,  and  the  concep- 
tion is  not,  as  it  has  often  been  asserted,  a 
literary,  but  always  a  pictorial,  one.  At 
times  imagination  and  execution  are  wholly 


WILLIAM  BLAKE  209 

untired,  as  in  the  splendid  water-colour  of 
'  Death  on  the  Pale  Horse,'  in  which  not 
only  every  line  and  colour  is  alive  with 
passionate  idea,  the  implacable  and  eternal 
joy  of  destruction,  but  also  with  a  realised 
beauty,  a  fully  grasped  invention.  No 
detail  has  been  slurred  in  vision,  or  in 
the  setting  down  of  the  vision :  the 
crowned  old  man  with  the  sword,  the 
galloping  horse,  the  pestilential  figure  of 
putrid  scales  and  flames  below,  and  the 
wide -armed  angel  with  the  scroll  above. 
In  the  vision  of '  Fire '  there  is  grandeur  and, 
along  with  it,  something  inadequately  seen, 
inadequately  rendered.  Flame  and  smoke 
embrace,  coil,  spire,  swell  in  bellying  clouds, 
divide  into  lacerating  tongues,  tangle  and 
whirl  ecstatically  upward  and  onward,  like 
a  venomous  joy  in  action,  painting  the  air 
with  all  the  colour  of  all  the  flowers  of  evil. 
But  the  figures  in  the  foreground  are  partly 
academic  studies,  partly  archaic  dolls,  in 
which  only  the  intention  is  admirable.  In 
'  Job  Confessing  his  Presumption  to  God ' 
one  sees  all  that  is  great  and  all  that  is 
childish  in  Blake's  genius.  I  have  never 
seen  so  sufficing  a  suggestion  of  disembodied 

o 


210  WILLIAM  BLAKE 

divine  forces  as  in  this  whirling  cloud  of 
angels,  cast  out  and  swept  round  by  the 
wind  of  God's  speed,  like  a  cascade  of  veined 
and  tapering  wings,  out  of  which  ecstatic 
and  astonished  heads  leap  forward.  But  in 
the  midst  of  the  wheel  a  fierce  old  man,  with 
outstretched  arms  (who  is  an  image  of  God 
certainly  not  corrected  out  of  any  authentic 
vision),  and,  below,  the  extinguished  figure 
of  Job's  friends,  and  Job,  himself  one  of 
Blake's  gnome-like  old  men  with  a  face  of 
rigid  awe  and  pointing  fingers  of  inarticulate 
terror,  remain  no  more  than  statements, 
literal  statements,  of  the  facts  of  the 
imagination.  They  are  summarised  remem- 
brances of  vision,  not  anything  'imagined 
in  stronger  and  better  lineaments,  and  in 
stronger  and  better  light,  than  the  perish- 
ing mortal  eye  can  see.' 

Or,  might  it  not  be  said  that  it  is  pre- 
cisely through  this  minute  accuracy  to  the 
detail  of  imagination  that  this  visionary 
reality  comes  to  seem  to  us  unreal  ?  In 
Blake  every  detail  is  seen  with  intensity, 
and  with  equal  intensity.  No  one  detail  is 
subordinated  to  another,  every  inch  of  his 
surface  is  equally  important  to  him ;  and 
from  this  unslackening  emphasis  come  alike 


WILLIAM  BLAKE  211 

his  arresting  power  and  the  defect  which 
leaves  us,  though  arrested,  often  uncon- 
vinced. In  his  most  splendid  things,  as  in 
'  Satan  exulting  over  Job '  and  '  Cain 
fleeing  from  the  Grave  of  Abel,'  which  are 
painted  on  wood,  as  if  carved  or  graved, 
with  a  tumult  of  decorative  colour,  detail 
literally  overpowers  the  sense  of  sight,  like 
strong  sunlight,  and  every  outline  seizes 
and  enters  into  you  simultaneously.  At 
times,  as  in  'The  Bard  of  Gray,'  and  'The 
Spiritual  Form  of  Pitt*  in  the  National 
Gallery,  he  is  mysteriously  lyrical  in  his 
paint,  and  creates  a  vague  emotion  out  of  a 
kind  of  musical  colour,  which  is  content  to 
suggest.  Still  more  rarely,  as  in  the  ripe 
and  admirable  '  Canterbury  Pilgrims,'  which 
is  a  picture  in  narrative,  as  like  Chaucer 
as  Chaucer  himself,  but  unlike  any  other 
picture,  he  gives  us  a  vision  of  worldly 
reality;  but  it  was  of  this  picture  that  he 
said :  '  If  Mr.  B.'s  "  Canterbury  Pilgrims  "  had 
been  done  by  any  other  power  than  that  of 
the  poetic  visionary,  it  would  have  been  as 
dull  as  his  adversary's.'  Pure  beauty  and 
pure  terror  creep  and  flicker  in  and  out  of  all 
his  pictures,  with  a  child's  innocence  ;  and  he 
is  unconscious  of  how  far  he  is  helped  or 


212  WILLIAM  BLAKE 

hindered,  as  an  artist,  by  that  burden  of  a 
divine  message  which  is  continuallyupon  him. 
He  is  unconscious  that  with  one  artist  the 
imagination  may  overpower  the  technique,  as 
awe  overpowers  the  senses,  while  to  another 
artist  the  imagination  gives  new  life  to  the 
technique.  Blake  did  not  understand  Rem- 
brandt, and  imagined  that  he  hated  him ; 
but  there  are  a  few  of  his  pictures  in  which 
Rembrandt  is  strangely  suggested.  In 
'  The  Adoration  of  the  Three  Kings '  and  in 
'  The  Angel  appearing  to  Zacharias '  there  is 
a  lovely  depth  of  colour,  bright  in  dimness, 
which  has  something  of  the  warmth  and 
mystery  of  Rembrandt,  and  there  are  details 
in  the  design  of  'The  Three  Kings'  (the 
door  open  on  the  pointing  star  in  the  sky 
and  on  the  shadowy  multitude  below)  which 
are  as  fine  in  conception  as  anything  in  the 
Munich  '  Adoration  of  the  Shepherds.'  But 
in  these,  or  in  the  almost  finer  '  Christ  in 
the  Garden,  sustained  by  an  Angel'  (fire 
flames  about  the  descending  angel,  and  the 
garden  is  a  forest  of  the  night),  how  fatal  to 
our  enjoyment  is  the  thought  of  Rembrandt ! 
To  Rembrandt,  too,  all  things  were  visions, 
but  they  were  visions  that  he  saw  with 
unflinching  eyes ;  he  saw  them  with  his 


WILLIAM  BLAKE  213 

hands ;  he  saw  them  with  the  faces  and 
forms  of  men,  and  with  the  lines  of  earthly 
hahitations. 

And,  above  all,  Rembrandt,  all  the  greatest 
painters,  saw  a  picture  as  a  whole,  composed 
every  picture  consciously,  giving  it  unity 
by  his  way  of  arranging  what  he  saw.  Blake 
was  too  humble  towards  vision  to  allow 
himself  to  compose  or  arrange  what  he  saw, 
and  he  saw  in  detail,  with  an  unparalleled 
fixity  and  clearness.  Every  picture  of 
Blake,  quite  apart  from  its  meaning  to  the 
intelligence,  is  built  up  in  detail  like  a  piece 
of  decoration ;  and,  widely  remote  as  are 
both  intention  and  result,  I  am  inclined  to 
think  he  composed  as  Japanese  artists  com- 
pose, bit  by  bit,  as  he  saw  his  picture  come 
piece  by  piece  before  him.  In  every  picture 
there  is  a  mental  idea,  and  there  is  also  a 
pictorial  conception,  working  visually  and 
apart  from  the  mental  idea.  In  the  greatest 
pictures  (in  the  tremendous  invention,  for  in- 
stance, of  the  soldiers  on  Calvary  casting 
lots  for  the  garments  of  Christ),  the  two  are 
fused,  with  overwhelming  effect;  but  it 
happens  frequently  that  the  two  fail  to  unite, 
and  we  see  the  picture,  and  also  the  idea,  but 
not  the  idea  embodied  in  the  picture. 


214  WILLIAM  BLAKE 

Blake's  passion  for  detail,  and  his  refusal 
to  subordinate  any  detail  for  any  purpose, 
is  to  be  seen  in  all  his  figures,  of  which  the 
bodies  seem  to  be  copied  from  living  statues, 
and  in  which  the  faces  are  wrung  into  masks 
of  moods  which  they  are  too  urgent  to 
interpret.  A  world  of  conventional  patterns, 
in  which  all  natural  things  are  artificial  and 
yet  expressive,  is  peopled  by  giants  and 
dolls,  muscular  and  foolish,  in  whom  strength 
becomes  an  insane  gesture  and  beauty  a 
formal  prettiness.  Not  a  flower  or  beast 
has  reality,  as  our  eyes  see  it,  yet  every 
flower  and  beast  is  informed  by  an  almost 
human  soul,  not  the  mere  vitality  of  animal 
or  vegetable,  but  a  consciousness  of  its  own 
lovely  or  evil  shape.  His  snakes  are  not 
only  wonderful  in  their  coils  and  colours, 
but  each  has  his  individual  soul,  visible  in 
his  eyes,  and  interpreting  those  coils  and 
colours.  And  every  leaf,  unnatural  yet  alive, 
and  always  a  piece  of  decoration,  peers  with 
some  meaning  of  its  own  out  of  every  corner, 
not  content  to  be  forgotten,  and  so  uneasily 
alive  that  it  draws  the  eye  to  follow  it. 
'As  poetry,'  he  said,  'admits  not  a  letter 
that  is  insignificant,  so  painting  admits  not 


WILLIAM  BLAKE  215 

a  grain  of  sand  or  a  blade  of  grass  insigni- 
ficant— much  less  an  insignificant  blur  or 
mark/  The  stones  with  which  Achan  has 
been  martyred  live  each  with  a  separate  and 
evil  life  of  its  own,  not  less  vivid  and  violent 
than  the  clenched  hands  raised  to  hurl  other 
stones ;  there  is  menacing  gesture  in  the 
cloud  of  dust  that  rises  behind  them.  And 
these  human  beings  and  these  angels,  and 
God  (sometimes  an  old  bowed  Jew,  fitted 
into  a  square  or  lozenge  of  winged  heads) 
are  full  of  the  energy  of  a  life  which  is  be- 
trayed by  their  bodies.  Sometimes  they 
are  mere  child's  toys,  like  a  Lucifer  of  bright 
baubles,  painted  chromatically,  with  pink 
hair  and  blushing  wings,  hung  with  burst- 
ing stars  that  spill  out  animalculae.  Some- 
times the  whole  man  is  a  gesture  and  con- 
vulses the  sky ;  or  he  runs,  and  the  earth 
vanishes  under  him.  But  the  gesture  de- 
vours the  man  also ;  his  force  as  a  cipher 
annihilates  his  very  being. 

In  greatness  of  conception  Blake  must  be 
compared  with  the  greatest  among  artists, 
but  the  difference  between  Blake  and 
Michelangelo  is  the  difference  between  the 
artist  in  whom  imagination  overpowers 


216  WILLIAM  BLAKE 

technique,  as  awe  overpowers  the  senses, 
and  the  artist  in  whom  imagination  gives 
new  life  to  technique.  No  one,  as  we  have 
seen,  was  more  conscious  of  the  identity 
which  exists  in  the  work  of  the  greatest 
artists  between  conception  and  execution. 
But  in  speaking  of  invention  and  execution 
as  equal,  he  is  assuming,  as  he  came  to  do, 
the  identity  of  art  and  inspiration,  the  suf- 
ficiency of  first  thoughts  in  art.  *  Be 
assured,'  he  writes  to  Mr.  Butts  from  Felp- 
ham,  'that  there  is  not  one  touch  in  those 
drawings  and  pictures  but  what  came  from 
my  head  and  heart  in  unison.  ...  If  I  were 
to  do  them  over  again,  they  would  lose  as 
much  as  they  gained,  because  they  were  done 
in  the  heat  of  my  spirit.'  He  was  an  in- 
exhaustible fountain  of  first  thoughts,  and 
to  him  first  thoughts  only  were  of  import- 
ance. The  one  draughtsman  of  the  soul, 
he  drew,  no  doubt,  what  he  saw  as  he  saw 
it ;  but  he  lacked  the  patience  which  is  a 
part  of  all  supreme  genius.  Having  seen 
his  vision,  he  is  in  haste  to  record  what  he 
has  seen  hastily ;  and  he  leaves  the  first 
rough  draft  as  it  stands,  not  correcting  it 
by  a  deliberate  seeing  over  again  from  the 


WILLIAM   BLAKE  217 

beginning,  and  a  scrupulous  translation  of 
the  terms  of  eternity  into  the  terms  of  time. 
I  was  once  showing  Rodin  some  facsimiles  of 
Blake's  drawings,  and  telling  him  about 
Blake,  I  said :  '  He  used  to  literally  see 
these  figures ;  they  are  not  mere  inventions/ 
'  Yes,'  said  Rodin,  '  he  saW  them  once ;  he 
should  have  seen  them  three  or  four  times.' 
There,  it  seems  to  me,  is  the  fundamental 
truth  about  the  art  of  Blake  :  it  is  a  record 
of  vision  which  has  not  been  thoroughly 
mastered  even  as  vision.  '  No  man/  said 
Blake,  '  can  improve  an  original  invention ; 
nor  can  an  original  invention  exist  without 
execution  organised,  delineated,  and  articu- 
lated, either  by  God  or  man.'  And  he  said 
also  :  '  He  who  does  not  imagine  in  stronger 
and  better  lineaments,  and  in  stronger  and 
better  light,  than  his  perishing  mortal  eye 
can  see,  does  not  imagine  at  all.'  But  Blake's 
imagination  is  in  rebellion,  not  only  against 
the  limits  of  reality,  but  against  the  only 
means  by  which  he  can  make  vision  visible 
to  others.  And  thus  he  allows  himself  to  be 
mastered  by  that  against  which  he  rebels  : 
that  power  of  the  hand  by  which  art  begins 
where  vision  leaves  off. 


218  WILLIAM  BLAKE 


IX 

NOTHING  is  known  of  Blake's  life  between 
1809,  the  date  of  his  exhibition,  and  1818, 
when  he  met  the  chief  friend  and  helper  of 
his  later  years,  John  Linnell.  Everything 
leads  us  to  believe  that  those  nine  years 
were  years  of  poverty  and  neglect.  Between 
1815  and  1817  we  find  him  doing  engraver's 
task-work  for  Flaxman's  Hesiod,  and  for 
articles,  probably  written  by  Flaxman,  on 
Armour  and  Sculpture  in  Rees's  Encyclo- 
paedia. Gilchrist  tells  a  story,  on  the  autho- 
rity of  Tatham,  of  Blake  copying  the  cast  of 
the  Laocoon  among  the  students  at  the 
Royal  Academy,  and  of  Fuseli,  then  the 
keeper,  coming  up  with  the  just  and  pleasant 
remark  that  it  was  they  who  should  learn  of 
him,  not  he  of  them.  The  Milton  and  the 
Jerusalem,  both  dated  1804,  were  printed 
at  some  time  during  this  period.  Gilchrist 
suggests  that  the  reason  why  Blake  issued 


WILLIAM  BLAKE  219 

no  more  engraved  books  from  his  press  was 
probably  his  inability  to  pay  for  the  copper 
required  in  engraving ;  and  his  suggestion 
is  confirmed  in  a  letter  to  Dawson  Turner, 
a  Norfolk  antiquary,  dated  June  9,  1818,  a 
few  days  before  the  meeting  with  Linnell. 
Blake  writes :  '  I  send  you  a  list  of  the 
different  works  you  have  done  me  the 
honour  to  inquire  after.  They  are  unprofit- 
able enough  to  me,  though  expensive  to  the 
buyer.  Those  I  printed  for  Mr.  Humphry 
are  a  selection  from  the  different  books  of 
such  as  could  be  printed  without  the  writing, 
though  to  the  loss  of  some  of  the  best  things ; 
for  they,  when  printed  perfect,  accompany 
poetical  personifications  and  acts,  without 
which  poems  they  never  could  have  been 
executed  : — 

£      s.       d. 

America,  18  prints  folio,  .550 
Europe,  17  do.  do.,  .550 
Visions,  8  do.  do.,  .330 
Thel,  6  do.  quarto,  .220 

Songs  of  Innocence,  28  prints 

octavo,  .  .  .  .330 
Songs  of  Experience,  26  do. 

octavo,     .         .         .         .330 


220  WILLIAM  BLAKE 

£       s.       d. 

Urizen,  28  prints  quarto,      .550 
Milton,  50     do.        do.,         .  10  10     0 
12  large  prints,  size  of  each 
about  2  ft.  by  Ij  ft.,  his- 
torical and  poetical,  printed 
in  colours,  each      ^ .  ^      ..550 

The  last  twelve  prints  are  unaccompanied 
by  any  writing.  The  few  I  have  printed 
and  sold  are  sufficient  to  have  gained  me 
great  reputation  as  an  artist,  which  was  the 
chief  thing  intended.  But  I  have  never 
been  able  to  produce  a  sufficient  number  for 
general  sale  by  means  of  a  regular  publisher. 
It  is  therefore  necessary  to  me  that  any 
person  wishing  to  have  any  or  all  of  them 
should  send  me  their  order  to  print  them 
on  the  above  terms,  and  I  will  take  care 
that  they  shall  be  done  at  least  as  well  as 
any  I  have  yet  produced.' 

If  we  compare  this  list  with  the  printed 
list  of  twenty-five  years  back  (see  p.  60)  we 
shall  see  that  the  prices  are  now  half  as 
many  guineas  as  they  were  once  shillings ; 
in  a  letter  to  Cumberland,  nine  years  later, 
they  have  gone  up  by  one,  two,  or  three 
guineas  apiece,  and  Blake  tells  Cumberland 


WILLIAM   BLAKE  221 

that  '  having  none  remaining  of  all  that  I 
had  printed,  I  cannot  print  more  except  at 
a  great  loss.  For  at  the  time  I  printed 
these  things  I  had  a  little  house  to  range  in. 
Now  I  am  shut  up  in  a  corner,  therefore  I 
am  forced  to  ask  a  price  for  them  that  I  can 
scarce  expect  to  get  from  a  stranger.  I  am 
now  printing  a  set  of  the  Songs  of  Innocence 
and  Experience  for  a  friend  at  ten  guineas, 
which  I  cannot  do  under  six  months  con- 
sistent with  my  other  work,  so  that  I  have 
little  hope  of  doing  any  more  of  such  things. 
The  last  work  is  a  poem  entitled  Jerusalem, 
the  Emanation  of  the  Giant  Albion,  but  find 
that  to  print  it  will  cost  my  time  to  the 
value  of  twenty  guineas.  One  I  have 
finished.  It  contains  100  plates,  but  it  is 
not  likely  that  I  shall  get  a  customer  for  it.' l 
Gilchrist  tells  us,  by  an  error  which  was 
pointed  out  in  the  life  of  Palmer  by  his  son, 
in  1892,  that  Blake  met  Linnell  in  1813. 
It  was  in  1818,  and  the  first  entry  relating 
to  Blake  in  Linnell's  journal  is  dated  June 
24.  In  a  letter  communicated  to  me  by  Mr. 

1  I  take  the  text  of  this  letter,  not  from  Mr.  Russell's 
edition,  but  from  the  fuller  text  printed  by  Mr.  Ellis  in  The 
Real  Blake. 


222  WILLIAM  BLAKE 

Sampson,  Mr.   John  Linnell,  junior,  states 
that  his  father  took  in  October  or  November 

1817  the  greater  part  of  a  house  at  38  Rath- 
bone  Place,  where  he  lived  till  the  end  of 

1818  ;  he  then  took  a  house  at  Cirencester 
Place,   Fitzroy  Square.     Mr.  Linnell  gives 
the  following  extract  from  his  father's  auto- 
biographical  notes :    '  At   Rathbone    Place, 
1818  .  .  .  here  I  first  became  acquainted  with 
William  Blake,  to  whom  I  paid  a  visit  in 
company  with  the  younger  Mr.  Cumberland. 
Blake  lived  then  in  South  Molton  Street,  Ox- 
ford Street,  second  floor.     We  soon  became 
intimate,  and  I  employed  him  to  help  me 
with  an  engraving  of  my  portrait  of  Mr.  Up- 
ton, a  Baptist  preacher,  which  he  was  glad  to 
do,  having  scarcely  enough  employment  to 
live  by  at  the  prices  he  could  obtain  ;  every- 
thing in  Art  was  at  a  low  ebb  then.  ...  I 
soon  encountered  Blake's  peculiarities,  and 
somewhat  taken  aback  by  the  boldness  of 
some  of  his  assertions,  I  never  saw  anything 
the  least  like  madness,  for  I  never  opposed 
him  spitefully,  as  many  did,  but  being  really 
anxious  to  fathom,  if  possible,  the  amount  of 
truth  which  might  be  in  his  most  startling 
assertions,  generally  met  with  a  sufficiently 


WILLIAM   BLAKE  223 

rational    explanation    in    the    most    really 
friendly  and  conciliatory  tone.' 

From  1818  Linnell  became,  in  his  own 
independent  way,  the  chief  friend  and  dis- 
ciple of  Blake.  Himself  a  man  of  narrow 
but  strong  individuality,  he  realised  and 
accepted  Blake  for  what  he  was,  worked 
with  him  and  for  him,  introduced  him  to 
rich  and  appreciative  buyers  like  Sir  Thomas 
Lawrence,  and  gave  him,  out  of  his  own 
carefully  controlled  purse,  a  steady  price  for 
his  work,  which  was  at  least  enough  for 
Blake  to  live  on.  There  are  notes  in  his 
journal  of  visits  to  picture-galleries  together; 
to  the  Academy,  the  British  Gallery,  the 
Water-Colour  Exhibition,  the  Spring  Gar- 
dens Exhibition  ;  '  went  with  Mr.  Blake  to 
see  Harlow's  copy  of  the  Transfiguration ' 
(August  20,  1819),  'went  with  Mr.  Blake 
to  British  Museum  to  see  prints'  (April  4 
and  24,  1823).  In  1820  there  are  notes  of 
two  visits  to  Drury  Lane  Theatre.  It  was 
probably  early  in  1819  that  Linnell  intro- 
duced Blake  to  his  friend  John  Varley,  the 
water-colour  painter  and  astrologer,  for 
whom  Blake  did  the  famous  '  visionary 
heads.'  A  vivid  sketch  of  the  two  arguing, 


224  WILLIAM   BLAKE 

drawn  by  Linnell,  is  given  in  Mr.  Story's 
Life  of  Linnell.  Yarley,  though  an  astro- 
loger on  the  mathematical  side,  was  no 
visionary.  He  persuaded  Blake  to  do  a 
series  of  drawings,  naming  historical  or 
legendary  people  to  him,  and  carefully 
writing  down  name  and  date  of  the  imagin- 
ary portraits  which  Blake  willingly  drew, 
and  believing,  it  has  been  said,  in  the  reality 
of  Blake's  visions  more  than  Blake  himself. 
Cunningham,  in  his  farcical  way,  tells  the 
story  as  he  may  have  got  it  from  Varley 
(see  p.  420  below),  for  he  claims  in  a  letter 
to  Linnell  to  have  '  received  much  valuable 
information  from  him.'  But  the  process  has 
been  described,  more  simply,  by  Varley  him- 
self in  his  Treatise  of  Zodiacal  Physiognomy 
(1828),  where  the  '  Ghost  of  a  Flea '  and  the 
'  Constellation  Cancer '  are  reproduced  in 
engraving.  Some  of  the  heads  are  finely 
symbolical,  and  I  should  have  thought  the 
ghost  of  a  flea,  in  the  sketch,  an  invention 
more  wholly  outside  nature  if  I  had  not 
seen,  in  Rome  and  in  London,  a  man  in 
whom  it  is  impossible  not  to  recognise  the 
type,  modified  to  humanity,  but  scarcely 
by  a  longer  distance  than  the  men  from  the 


WILLIAM  BLAKE  225 

animals  in  Giovanni  della  Porta's  '  Fisonomia 
dell'  Huomo.' 

It  was  in  1820,  the  year  in  which  Blake 
began  his  vast  picture  of  the  '  Last  Judgment/ 
only  finished  in  the  year  of  his  death,  that 
he  did  the  seventeen  woodcuts  to  Thornton's 
Virgil,  certainly  one  of  his  greatest,  his  most 
wholly  successful  achievements.  The  book 
was  for  boys'  schools,  and  we  find  Blake 
returning  without  an  effort  to  the  childlike 
mood  of  the  Songs  of  Innocence  and  Ex- 
perience. The  woodcuts  have  all  the  natural 
joy  of  those  early  designs,  an  equal  simpli- 
city, but  with  what  added  depth,  what  rich- 
ness, what  passionate  strength  !  Blake  was 
now  engraving  on  wood  for  the  first  time, 
and  he  had  to  invent  his  own  way  of  work- 
ing. Just  what  he  did  has  never  been  better 
defined  than  in  an  article  which  appeared 
in  the  Athenceum  of  January  21,  1843,  one 
of  the  very  few  intelligent  references  to 
Blake  which  can  be  found  in  print  between 
the  time  of  his  death  and  the  date  of  Gil- 
christ's  Life.  '  We  hold  it  impossible,'  says 
the  writer,  '  to  get  a  genuine  work  of  art, 
unless  it  come  pure  and  unadulterated  from 
the  mind  that  conceived  it.  ...  Still  more 

p 


226  WILLIAM   BLAKE 

strongly  is  the  author's  meaning  marked  in 
the  few  wood- engravings  which  that  wonder- 
ful man  Blake  cut  himself  for  an  edition  of 
Thornton's  Pastorals  of  Virgil.  In  token 
of  our  faith  in  the  principle  here  announced, 
we  have  obtained  the  loan  of  one  of  Blake's 
original  blocks,  from  Mr.  Linnell,  who  pos- 
sesses the  whole  series,  to  print,  as  an  illus- 
tration of  our  argument,  that,  amid  all 
drawbacks,  there  exists  a  power  in  the  work 
of  the  man  of  genius,  which  no  one  but 
himself  can  utter  fully.  Side  by  side  we 
have  printed  a  copy  of  an  engraver's  im- 
proved version  of  the  same  subject.  When 
Blake  had  produced  his  cuts,  which  were, 
however,  printed  with  an  apology,  a  shout 
of  derision  was  raised  by  the  wood-engravers. 
"  This  will  never  do  ! "  said  they ;  "  we  will 
show  what  it  ought  to  be" — that  is,  what 
the  public  taste  would  like — and  they  pro- 
duced the  above  amendment !  The  engravers 
were  quite  right  in  their  estimate  of  public 
taste ;  and  we  dare  say  many  will  agree 
with  them  even  now :  yet,  to  our  minds, 
Blake's  rude  work,  utterly  without  preten- 
sion, too,  as  an  engraving  —  the  merest 
attempt  of  a  fresh  apprentice — is  a  work 


WILLIAM   BLAKE  227 

of  genius ;  whilst  the  latter  is  but  a  piece 
of  smooth,  tame  mechanism.' 

Blake  lived  at  South  Molton  Street  for 
seventeen  years.  In  1821,  'on  his  landlord's 
leaving  off  business,  and  retiring  to  France,' 
says  Linnell,  he  removed  to  Fountain  Court, 
in  the  Strand,  where  he  took  the  first  floor 
of '  a  private  house  kept  by  Mr.  Banes,  whose 
wife  was  a  sister  of  Mrs.  Blake.'  Linnell 
tells  us  that  he  was  at  this  time  *  in  want 
of  employment,'  and,  he  says,  '  before  I  knew 
his  distress  he  had  sold  all  his  collection 
of  old  prints  to  Messrs.  Colnaghi  and  Co.' 
Through  Linnell's  efforts,  a  donation  of  £25 
was  about  the  same  time  sent  to  him  from 
the  Royal  Academy. 

Fountain  Court  (the  name  is  still  per- 
petuated on  a  metal  slab)  was  called  so  until 
1883,  when  the  name  was  changed  to  South- 
ampton Buildings.  It  has  all  been  pulled 
down  and  rebuilt,  but  I  remember  it  fifteen 
years  ago,  when  there  were  lodging-houses 
in  it,  by  the  side  of  the  stage-door  of  Terry's 
Theatre.  It  was  a  narrow  slit  between  the 
Strand  and  the  river,  and,  when  I  knew  it, 
was  dark  and  comfortless,  a  blind  alley. 
Gilchrist  describes  the  two  rooms  on  the 


228  WILLIAM   BLAKE 

first  floor,  front  and  back,  the  front  room 
used  as  a  reception-room ;  a  smaller  room 
opened  out  of  it  at  the  back,  which  was 
workroom,  bedroom,  and  kitchen  in  one. 
The  side  window  looked  down  through  an 
opening  between  the  houses,  showing  the 
river  and  the  hills  beyond ;  and  Blake 
worked  at  a  table  facing  the  window.  There 
seems  to  be  no  doubt,  from  the  testimony 
of  many  friends,  that  Crabb  Robinson's 
description,  which  will  be  seen  below,  on 
p.  261,  with  fuller  detail  than  has  yet  been 
printed,  conveys  the  prejudiced  view  of  a 
fastidious  person,  and  Palmer,  roused  by  the 
word  '  squalor,'  wrote  to  Gilchrist,  asserting 
'  himself,  his  wife,  and  his  rooms,  were  clean 
and  orderly ;  everything  was  in  its  place.' 
Tatham  says  that '  he  fixed  upon  these  lodg- 
ings as  being  more  congenial  to  his  habits,  as 
he  was  very  much  accustomed  to  get  out  of 
his  bed  in  the  night  to  write  for  hours,  and 
return  to  bed  for  the  rest  of  the  night.'  He 
rarely  left  the  house,  except  to  fetch  his  pint 
of  porter  from  the  public -house  at  the  corner 
of  the  Strand.  It  was  on  one  of  these  occa- 
sions that  he  is  said  to  have  been  cut  by  a 
Royal  Academician  whom  he  had  recently 


WILLIAM  BLAKE  229 

met  in  society.  Had  not  the  Royal  Academy 
been  founded  (J.  T.  Smith  tells  us  in  his 
Book  for  a  Rainy  Day,  under  date  1768) 
by  '  members  who  had  agreed  to  withdraw 
themselves  from  various  clubs,  not  only  in 
order  to  be  more  select  as  to  talent,  but 
perfectly  correct  as  to  gentlemanly  conduct'  ? 

It  was  about  this  time  that  Blake  was 
discovered,  admired,  and  helped  by  one  who 
has  been  described  as  '  not  merely  a  poet 
and  a  painter,  an  art-critic,  an  antiquarian, 
and  a  writer  of  prose,  an  amateur  of  beautiful 
things,  and  a  dilettante  of  things  delightful, 
but  also  a  forger  of  no  mean  or  ordinary 
capabilities,  and  as  a  subtle  and  secret 
poisoner  almost  without  rival  in  this  or 
any  age/  This  was  Lamb's  'kind,  light- 
hearted  Waine wright,'  who  in  the  intervals 
of  his  strange  crimes  found  time  to  buy  a 
fine  copy  of  the  Songs  of  Innocence  and  to 
give  a  jaunty  word  of  encouragement  or 
advertisement  to  Jerusalem.  Palmer  re- 
members Blake  stopping  before  one  of 
Wainewright's  pictures  in  the  Academy 
and  saying,  '  Very  fine.' 

In  1820  Blake  had  carried  out  his  last 
commission  from  Butts  in  a  series  of  twenty- 


230  WILLIAM   BLAKE 

one  drawings  in  illustration  of  the  Book  of 
Job.  In  the  following  year  Linnell  com- 
missioned from  him  a  duplicate  set,  and  in 
September  1821  traced  them  himself  from 
Butts's  copies ;  they  were  finished,  and  in  parts 
altered,  by  Blake.  By  an  agreement  dated 
March  25,  1823,  Blake  undertook  to  engrave 
the  designs,  which  were  to  be  published  by 
Linnell,  who  gave  £100  for  the  designs  and 
copyright,  with  the  promise  of  another  £100 
out  of  the  profits  on  the  sale.  There  were 
no  profits,  but  Linnell  gave  another  £50, 
paying  the  whole  sum  of  £150  in  weekly 
sums  of  £2  or  £3.  The  plates  are  dated 
March  8,  1825,  but  they  were  not  published 
until  the  date  given  on  the  cover,  March 
1826.  Gilchrist  intimates  that  'much  must 
be  lost  by  the  way '  in  the  engraving  of  the 
water-colour  drawings ;  but  Mr.  Russell,  a 
better  authority,  says  that  'marvellous  as 
the  original  water-colour  drawings  unques- 
tionably were,  they  are  in  every  case  inferior 
to  the  final  version  in  the  engraving/  It  is 
on  these  engravings  that  the  fame  of  Blake 
as  an  artist  rests  most  solidly ;  invention 
and  execution  are  here,  as  he  declared  that 
they  must  always  be  in  great  art,  equal ; 


WILLIAM  BLAKE  231 

imagination  at  its  highest  here  finds  adequate 
expression,  without  even  the  lovely  strange- 
ness of  a  defect.  They  have  been  finally 
praised  and  defined  by  Rossetti,  in  the 
pages  contributed  to  Gilchrist's  life  (i.  330- 
335),  of  which  Mr.  Swinburne  has  said,  with 
little  exaggeration,  that  '  Blake  himself, 
had  he  undertaken  to  write  notes  on  his 
designs,  must  have  done  them  less  justice 
than  this.' 

Before  Blake  had  finished  engraving  the 
designs  to  'Job'  he  had  already  begun  a 
new  series  of  illustrations  to  Dante,  also  a 
commission  from  Linnell ;  and,  with  that 
passionate  conscientiousness  which  was  part 
of  the  foundation  of  his  genius,  he  set  to 
work  to  learn  enough  Italian  to  be  able  to 
follow  the  original  with  the  help  of  Gary's 
translation.  Linnell  not  only  let  Blake  do 
the  work  he  wanted  to  do,  paying  him  for 
it  as  he  did  it,  but  he  took  him  to  see 
people  whom  it  might  be  useful  for  him  to 
know,  such  as  the  Aders,  who  had  a  house 
full  of  books  and  pictures,  and  who  enter- 
tained artists  and  men  of  letters.  Mrs. 
Aders  had  a  small  amateur  talent  of  her 
own  for  painting,  and  from  a  letter  of  Car- 


232  WILLIAM  BLAKE 

lyle's,  which  is  preserved  among  the  Crabb 
Robinson  papers,  seems  to  have  had  literary 
knowledge  as  well.  '  Has  not  Mrs.  Aders 
(the  lady  who  lent  me  Wilhelm  Meister] 
great  skill  in  such  things  ?  '  he  asks  in  a 
letter  full  of  minute  inquiries  into  German 
novels.  Lamb  and  Coleridge  went  to  the 
house,  and  it  was  there  that  Crabb  Robinson 
met  Blake  in  December  1825.  Mr.  Story, 
in  his  Life  of  Linnell,  tells  us  that  one  of 
LinnelTs  '  most  vivid  recollections  of  those 
days  was  of  hearing  Crabb  Robinson  recite 
Blake's  poem,  "The  Tiger,"  before  a  dis- 
tinguished company  gathered  at  Mrs.  Aders's 
table.  It  was  a  most  impressive  perform- 
ance.' We  find  Blake  afterwards  at  a 
supper-party  at  Crabb  Robinson's,  with 
Linnell,  who  notes  in  his  journal  going  with 
Blake  to  Lady  Ford's,  to  see  her  pictures ; 
in  1820  we  find  him  at  Lady  Caroline 
Lamb's. 

Along  with  this  general  society  Blake 
now  gathered  about  him  a  certain  number 
of  friends  and  disciples,  Linnell  being  the 
steadiest  friend,  and  Samuel  Palmer,  Edward 
Calvert,  and  George  Richmond  the  chief 
disciples.  To  these  must  be  added,  in  1826, 


WILLIAM  BLAKE  233 

Frederick  Tatham,  a  young  sculptor,  who 
was  to  be  the  betrayer  among  the  disciples. 
They  called  Blake's  house  '  the  House  of  the 
Interpreter/  and  in  speaking  of  it  afterwards 
speak  of  it  always  as  of  holy  ground.  Thus 
we  hear  of  Richmond,  finding  his  invention 
flag,  going  to  seek  counsel,  and  how  Blake, 
who  was  sitting  at  tea  with  his  wife,  turned 
to  her  and  said :  *  What  do  we  do,  Kate, 
when  the  visions  forsake  us  ? '  '  We  kneel 
down  and  pray,  Mr.  Blake.'  It  is  Richmond 
who  records  a  profoundly  significant  saying 
of  Blake  :  '  I  can  look  at  a  knot  in  a  piece 
of  wood  till  I  am  frightened  at  it.'  Palmer 
tells  us  that  Blake  and  his  wife  would  look 
into  the  fire  together  and  draw  the  figures 
they  saw  there,  hers  quite  unlike  his,  his 
often  terrible.  On  Palmer's  first  meeting 
that  Blake,  on  October  9,  1824,  he  tells  us 
how  Blake  fixed  his  eyes  upon  him  and  said  : 
'  Do  you  work  with  fear  and  trembling  ? ' 
'  Yes,  indeed,'  was  the  reply.  '  Then,'  said 
Blake,  'you '11  do.' 

The  friends  often  met  at  Hampstead, 
where  Linnell  had,  in  1824,  taken  Collins's 
Farm,  at  North  End,  now  again  known  by 
its  old  name  of  '  Wyldes.'  Blake  disliked 


234  WILLIAM  BLAKE 

the  air  of  Hampstead,  which  he  said  always 
made  him  ill ;  but  he  often  went  there  to 
see  Linnell,  and  loved  the  aspect  from  his 
cottage,  and  to  sit  and  hear  Mrs.  Linnell 
sing  Scotch  songs,  and  would  sometimes 
himself  sing  his  own  songs  to  tunes  of  his 
own  making.  The  children  loved  him,  and 
would  watch  for  him  as  he  came,  generally 
on  foot,  and  one  of  them  says  that  she 
remembers  '  the  cold  winter  nights  when 
Blake  was  wrapped  up  in  an  old  shawl  by 
Mrs.  Linnell,  and  sent  on  his  homeward 
way,  with  the  servant,  lantern  in  hand, 
lighting  him  across  the  heath  to  the  main 
road.'  It  is  Palmer's  son  who  reports  it, 
and  he  adds  :  '  It  is  a  matter  of  regret  that 
the  record  of  these  meetings  and  walks  and 
conversations  is  so  imperfect,  for  in  the 
words  of  one  of  Blake's  disciples,  to  walk 
with  him  was  like  "walking  with  the 
Prophet  Isaiah." '  Once  when  the  Palmers 
were  staying  at  Shoreham,  the  whole  party 
went  down  into  the  country  in  a  carrier's 
van  drawn  by  eight  horses :  Calvert  tells 
the  story,  with  picturesque  details  of  Blake's 
second-sight,  and  of  the  hunt  with  lanterns 
in  Shoreham  Castle  after  a  ghost,  who 


WILLIAM   BLAKE  235 

turned  out  to  be  a  snail  tapping  on  the 
broken  glass  of  the  window. 

From  the  end  of  1825  Blake's  health  began 
to  fail,  and  most  of  his  letters  to  Linnell 
contain  apologies  for  not  coming  to  Hamp- 
stead,  as  he  is  in  bed,  or  is  suffering  from  a 
cold  in  the  stomach.  It  was  the  beginning 
of  that  sickness  which  killed  him,  described 
as  the  mixing  of  the  gall  with  the  blood. 
He  worked  persistently,  whether  he  was 
well  or  ill,  at  the  Dante  drawings,  which  he 
made  in  a  folio  book  given  him  by  Linnell. 
There  were  a  hundred  pages  in  the  book, 
and  he  did  a  drawing  on  every  page,  some 
completely  finished,  some  a  mere  outline ; 
of  these  he  had  only  engraved  seven  at  the 
time  of  his  death.  He  sat  propped  up  in 
bed,  at  work  on  his  drawings,  saying, '  Dante 
goes  on  the  better,  which  is  all  I  care  about.' 
In  a  letter  to  George  Cumberland,  on  April 
12,  1827,  he  writes  :  '  I  have  been  very  near 
the  gates  of  death,  and  have  returned  very 
weak  and  an  old  man,  feeble  and  tottering, 
but  not  in  the  spirit  and  life,  not  in  the  real 
man,  the  imagination,  which  liveth  for  ever.' 
And  indeed  there  is  no  sign  of  age  or  weak- 
ness in  these  last  great  inventions  of  a  dying 


236  WILLIAM   BLAKE 

man.  '  Flaxman  is  gone,'  he  adds,  '  and  we 
must  soon  follow,  every  one  to  his  own 
eternal  house,  leaving  the  delusive  Goddess 
Nature  to  her  laws,  to  get  into  freedom  from 
all  law  of  the  numbers,  into  the  mind,  in 
which  every  one  is  king  and  priest  in  his 
own  house.  God  send  it  so  on  earth,  as  it 
is  in  heaven.' 

Blake  died  on  August  12,  1827,  and  the 
ecstasy  of  his  death  has  been  recorded  by 
many  witnesses.  Tatham  tells  us  how,  as 
he  put  the  finishing  touches  to  a  design  of 
*  The  Ancient  of  Days '  which  he  had  been 
colouring  for  him,  he  '  threw  it  down  sud- 
denly and  said :  "  Kate,  you  have  been  a 
good  wife ;  I  will  draw  your  portrait."  She 
sat  near  his  bed,  and  he  made  a  drawing 
which,  though  not  a  likeness,  is  finely 
touched  and  expressed.  He  then  threw 
that  down,  after  having  drawn  for  an  hour, 
and  began  to  sing  Hallelujahs  and  songs  of 
joy  and  triumph  which  Mrs.  Blake  described 
as  being  truly  sublime  in  music  and  in  verse.' 
Smith  tells  us  that  he  said  to  his  wife,  as 
she  stood  to  hear  him,  '  My  beloved,  they 
are  not  mine,  no,  they  are  not  mine.'  And 
a  friend  quoted  by  Gilchrist  says :  '  He 


WILLIAM   BLAKE  237 

died  on  Sunday  night,  at  six  o'clock,  in  a 
most  glorious  manner.  He  said  he  was 
going  to  that  country  he  had  all  his  life 
wished  to  see,  and  expressed  himself  happy, 
hoping  for  salvation  through  Jesus  Christ. 
Just  before  he  died  his  countenance  became 
fair,  his  eyes  brightened,  and  he  burst  out 
into  singing  of  the  things  he  saw  in  heaven.' 
'Perhaps/  he  had  written  not  long  before, 
'  and  I  verily  believe  it,  every  death  is  an 
improvement  of  the  state  of  the  departed/ 

Blake  was  buried  in  Bunhill  Fields,  where 
all  his  family  had  been  buried  before  him, 
but  with  the  rites  of  the  Church  of  England, 
and  on  August  17  his  body  was  followed  to 
the  grave  by  Calvert,  Richmond,  Tatham, 
and  Tatham's  brother,  a  clergyman.  The 
burial  register  reads:  'Aug.  17,  1827. 
William  Blake.  Age,  69  years.  Brought 
from  Fountain  Court,  Strand.  Grave,  9  feet; 
E.  &  W.  77  :  N.  &  S.  32.  19/.'  The  grave, 
being  a  '  common  grave,'  was  used  again, 
and  the  bones  scattered ;  and  this  was  the 
world's  last  indignity  against  William  Blake. 

Tatham  tells  us  that,  during  a  marriage 
of  forty-five  years,  Mrs.  Blake  had  never 
been  separated  from  her  husband  '  save  for 


238  WILLIAM  BLAKE 

a  period  that  would  make  altogether  about 
five  weeks.'  He  does  not  remind  us,  as 
Mr.  Swinburne,  on  the  authority  of  Seymour 
Kirkup,  reminds  us,  of  Mrs.  Blake's  one 
complaint,  that  her  husband  was  incessantly 
away  '  in  Paradise.'  Tatham  adds  :  '  After 
the  death  of  her  husband  she  resided  for 
some  time  with  the  author  of  this,  whose 
domestic  arrangements  were  entirely  under- 
taken by  her,  until  such  changes  took  place 
that  rendered  it  impossible  for  her  strength 
to  continue  in  this  voluntary  office  of  sin- 
cere affection  and  regard.'  Before  going  to 
Tatham's  she  had  spent  nine  months  at 
Linnell's  house  in  Cirencester  Place,  only 
leaving  it  in  the  summer  of  1828,  when 
Linnell  let  the  house.  After  leaving  Tatham 
she  took  lodgings  in  17  Upper  Charlotte 
Street,  Fitzroy  Square,  where  she  died  at 
half-past  seven  on  the  morning  of  October 
18,  1831,  four  years  after  the  death  of  her 
husband,  and  within  three  months  of  his 
age.  Tatham  says  :  '  Her  death  not  being 
known  but  by  calculation,  sixty-five  years 
were  placed  upon  her  coffin,'  and  in  the 
burial  register  at  Bunhill  Fields  we  read  : 
'Oct.  23,  1831.  Catherine  Sophia  Blake. 


WILLIAM   BLAKE  239 

Age,  65  yrs.  Brought  from  Upper  Charlotte 
Street,  Fitzroy  Square.  Grave,  12  feet ; 
E.  &  W.  7  :  N.  &  S.  31,  32.  £1,  5s.'  She 
was  born  April  24,  1762,  and  was  thus 
aged  sixty-nine  years  and  six  months. 

Mr.  Swinburne  tells  us,  on  the  authority 
of  Seymour  Kirkup,  that,  after  Blake's 
death,  a  gift  of  £100  was  sent  to  his  widow 
by  the  Princess  Sophia,  which  she  grate- 
fully returned,  as  not  being  in  actual  need 
of  it.  Many  friends  bought  copies  of  Blake's 
engraved  books,  some  of  which  Mrs.  Blake 
coloured,  with  the  help  of  Tatham.  After 
her  death  all  the  plates  and  manuscripts 
passed  into  Tatham 's  hands.  In  his  memoir 
Tatham  says  that  Blake  on  his  death-bed 
'  spoke  of  the  writer  of  this  as  a  likely 
person  to  become  the  manager'  of  Mrs. 
Blake's  affairs,  and  he  says  that  Mrs.  Blake 
bequeathed  to  him  'all  of  his  works  that 
remained  unsold  at  his  death,  being  writings, 
paintings,  and  a  very  great  number  of  copper- 
plates, of  whom  impressions  may  be  obtained.' 
Linnell  says  that  Tatham  never  showed  any- 
thing in  proof  of  his  assertion  that  they 
had  been  left  to  him.  Tatham  had  passed 
through  various  religious  phases,  and  from 


240  WILLIAM  BLAKE 

being  a  Baptist,  had  become  an  '  angel '  of 
the  Irvingite  Church.  He  is  supposed  to 
have  destroyed  the  whole  of  the  manuscripts 
and  drawings  in  his  possession  on  account 
of  religious  scruples ;  and  in  the  life  of 
Calvert  by  his  son  we  read :  '  Edward 
Calvert,  fearing  some  fatal  denouement,  went 
to  Tat  ham  and  implored  him  to  reconsider 
the  matter  and  spare  the  good  man's  precious 
work ;  notwithstanding  which,  blocks,  plates, 
drawings,  and  MSS.,  I  understand,  were 
destroyed.' 

Such  is  the  received  story,  but  is  it 
strictly  true  ?  Did  Tatham  really  destroy 
these  manuscripts  for  religious  reasons,  or 
did  he  keep  them  and  surreptitiously  sell 
them  for  reasons  of  quite  another  kind  ?  In 
the  Rossetti  Papers  there  is  a  letter  from 
Tatham  to  Mr.  W.  M.  Eossetti,  dated 
Nov.  6,  1862,  in  which  he  says:  'I  have 
sold  Mr.  Blake's  works  for  thirty  years ' ; 
and  a  footnote  to  Dr.  Garnett's  monograph 
on  Blake  in  the  The  Portfolio  of  1895  relates 
a  visit  from  Tatham  which  took  place  about 
1860.  Dr.  Garnett  told  me  that  Tatham 
had  said,  without  giving  any  explanation, 
that  he  had  destroyed  some  of  Blake's  manu- 


WILLIAM  BLAKE  241 

scripts  and  kept  others  by  him,  which  he 
had  sold  from  time  to  time.  Is  there  not 
therefore  a  possibility  that  some  of  these 
lost  manuscripts  may  still  exist?  whether 
or  not  they  may  turn  out  to  be,  as  Crabb 
Robinson  tells  us  that  Blake  told  him,  '  six 
or  seven  epic  poems  as  long  as  Homer,  and 
twenty  tragedies  as  long  as  Macbeth.' 


242  WILLIAM   BLAKE 


THERE  are  people  who  still  ask  seriously  if 
Blake  was  mad.  If  the  mind  of  Lord 
Macaulay  is  the  one  and  only  type  of  sanity, 
then  Blake  was  mad.  If  imagination,  and 
ecstasy,  and  disregard  of  worldly  things, 
and  absorption  in  the  inner  world  of  the 
mind,  and  a  literal  belief  in  those  things 
which  the  whole  '  Christian  community ' 
professes  from  the  tip  of  its  tongue ;  if 
these  are  signs  and  suspicions  of  madness, 
then  Blake  was  certainly  mad.  His  place 
is  where  he  saw  Teresa,  among  '  the  gentle 
souls  who  guide  the  great  wine-press 
of  Love ' ;  and,  like  her,  he  was  '  drunk 
with  intellectual  vision.'  That  drunkenness 
illuminated  him  during  his  whole  life,  yet 
without  incapacitating  him  from  any  needful 
attention  to  things  by  the  way.  He  lived 
in  poverty  because  he  did  not  need  riches ; 
but  he  died  without  leaving  a  debt.  He 
was  a  steady,  not  a  fitful  worker,  and  his 


WILLIAM  BLAKE  243 

wife  said  of  him  that '  she  never  saw  his 
hands  still  unless  he  was  reading  or  asleep. 
He  was  gentle  and  sudden  ;  his  whole  nature 
was  in  a  steady  heat  which  could  blaze  at 
any  moment  into  a  flame.  '  A  saint  amongst 
the  infidels  and  a  heretic  with  the  orthodox/ 
he  has  been  described  by  one  who  knew  him 
best  in  his  later  years,  John  Linnell ;  and 
Palmer  has  said  of  him :  '  His  love  of  art 
was  so  great  that  he  would  see  nothing  but 
art  in  anything  he  loved ;  and  so,  as  he  loved 
the  Apostles  and  their  divine  Head  (for  so 
I  believe  he  did),  he  must  needs  say  that 
they  were  all  artists.'  *  When  opposed  by 
the  superstitious,  the  crafty,  or  the  proud/ 
says  Linnell  again,  '  he  outraged  all  common- 
sense  and  rationality  by  the  opinions  he 
advanced '  ;  and  Palmer  gives  an  instance 
of  it :  '  Being  irritated  by  the  exclusively 
scientific  talk  at  a  friend's  house,  which  talk 
had  turned  on  the  vastness  of  space,  he  cried 
out,  "  It  is  false.  I  walked  the  other  evening 
to  the  end  of  the  heath,  and  touched  the 
sky  with  my  finger." 

It  was  of  the  essence  of  Blake's  sanity 
that  he  could  always  touch  the  sky  with  his 
finger.  'To  justify  the  soul's  frequent  joy 


244  WILLIAM  BLAKE 

in  what  cannot  be  defined  to  the  intellectual 
part,  or  to  calculation '  :  that,  which  is  Walt 
Whitman's  definition  of  his  own  aim,  defines 
Blake's.  Where  others  doubted  he  knew ; 
and  he  saw  where  others  looked  vaguely 
into  the  darkness.  He  saw  so  much  further 
than  others  into  what  we  call  reality,  that 
others  doubted  his  report,  not  being  able  to 
check  it  for  themselves ;  and  when  he  saw 
truth  naked  he  did  not  turn  aside  his  eyes. 
Nor  had  he  the  common  notion  of  what 
truth  is,  or  why  it  is  to  be  regarded.  He 
said  :  c  When  I  tell  a  truth  it  is  not  for  the 
sake  of  convincing  those  who  do  not  know 
it,  but  for  the  sake  of  defending  those  who 
do.'  And  his  criterion  of  truth  was  the 
inward  certainty  of  instinct  or  intuition, 
not  the  outward  certainty  of  fact.  '  God 
forbid,'  he  said,  '  that  Truth  should  be  con- 
fined to  mathematical  demonstration.  He 
who  does  not  know  Truth  at  sight  is 
unworthy  of  her  notice.'  And  he  said : 
'  Error  is  created,  truth  is  eternal.  Error 
or  creation  will  be  burned  up,  and  then,  not 
till  then,  truth  or  eternity  will  appear.  It 
is  burned  up  the  moment  men  cease  to 
behold  it.' 


WILLIAM   BLAKE  245 

It  was  this  private  certainty  in  regard  to 
truth  and  all  things  that  Blake  shared  with 
the  greatest  minds  of  the  world,  and  men 
doubted  him  partly  because  he  was  content 
to  possess  that  certainty  and  had  no  desire 
to  use  it  for  any  practical  purpose,  least  of 
all  to  convince  others.  He  asked  to  be 
believed  when  he  spoke,  told  the  truth, 
and  was  not  concerned  with  argument  or 
experiment,  which  seemed  to  him  ways  of 
evasion.  He  said : 

'  It  is  easy  to  acknowledge  a  man  to  be  great  and  good, 

while  we 
Derogate  from  him  in  the  trifles  and  small  articles  of 

that  goodness, 
Those  alone  are  his  friends  who  admire  his  minutest 

powers.' 

He  spoke  naturally  in  terms  of  wisdom,  and 
made  no  explanations,  bridged  none  of  the 
gulfs  which  it  seemed  to  him  so  easy  to  fly 
over.  Thus  when  he  said  that  Ossian  and 
Rowley  were  authentic,  and  that  what 
Macpherson  and  Chatterton  said  was  ancient 
was  so,  he  did  not  mean  it  in  a  strictly 
literal  sense,  but  in  the  sense  in  which 
ancient  meant  authentic  :  true  to  ancient 
truth.  Is  a  thing  true  as  poetry  ?  then  it 


246  WILLIAM  BLAKE 

is  true  in  the  minutest  because  the  most 
essential  sense.  On  the  other  hand,  in 
saying  that  part  of  Wordsworth's  Preface 
was  written  by  another  hand,  he  was  merely 
expressing  in  a  bold  figure  a  sane  critical 
opinion.  Is  a  thing  false  among  many  true 
things  ?  then  it  is  not  the  true  man  who  is 
writing  it,  but  some  false  section  of  his 
brain.  It  may  be  dangerous  practically  to 
judge  all  things  at  an  inner  tribunal ;  but  it 
is  only  by  such  judgments  that  truth  moves. 
And  truth  has  moved,  or  we  have.  After 
Zarathustra,  Jerusalem  no  longer  seems  a 
wild  heresy.  People  were  frightened  because 
they  were  told  that  Blake  was  mad,  or  a 
blasphemer.  Nietzsche,  who  has  cleared 
away  so  many  obstructions  from  thought, 
has  shamed  us  from  hiding  behind  these 
treacherous  and  unavailing  defences.  We 
have  come  to  realise,  what  Rossetti  pointed 
out  long  ago,  that,  as  a  poet,  Blake's  char- 
acteristic is  above  all  things  that  of  'pure 
perfection  in  writing  verse'  We  no  longer 
praise  his  painting  for  its  qualities  as  litera- 
ture, or  forget  that  his  design  has  greatness 
as  design.  And  of  that  unique  creation  of 
an  art  out  of  the  mingling  of  many  arts 


WILLIAM  BLAKE  247 

which  we  see  in  the  '  illuminated  printing ' 
of  the  engraved  books,  we  have  come  to 
realise  what  Palmer  meant  when  he  said 
long  ago  :  '  As  a  picture  has  been  said  to  be 
something  between  a  thing  and  a  thought, 
so,  in  some  of  these  type  books  over  which 
Blake  had  long  brooded  with  his  brooding 
of  fire,  the  very  paper  seems  to  come  to  life 
as  you  gaze  upon  it — not  with  a  mortal  life, 
but  an  indestructible  life.'  And  we  have 
come  to  realise  what  Blake  meant  by  the 
humble  and  arrogant  things  which  he  said 
about  himself.  *  I  doubt  not  yet/  he  writes 
in  one  of  those  gaieties  of  speech  which 
illuminate  his  letters,  'to  make  a  figure 
in  the  great  dance  of  life  that  shall  amuse 
the  spectators  in  the  sky.'  If  there  are 
indeed  spectators  there,  amused  by  our 
motions,  what  dancer  among  us  are  they 
more  likely  to  have  approved  than  this 
joyous,  untired,  and  undistracted  dancer  to 
the  eternal  rhythm  ? 


II 

BECORDS  FROM  CONTEMPORARY 
SOURCES 


(I.)  EXTRACTS  FROM  THE  DIARY,  LETTERS, 
AND  REMINISCENCES  OF  HENRY  CRABB 
ROBINSON,  transcribed  from  the  Original  MSS. 
in  Dr.  Williams's  Library.  1810-1852. 


'OF  all  the  records  of  these  his  latter  years,'  says  Mr. 
Swinburne  in  his  book  on  Blake,  '  the  most  valuable,  perhaps, 
are  those  furnished  by  Mr.  Crabb  Robinson,  whose  cautious 
and  vivid  transcription  of  Blake's  actual  speech  is  worth 
more  than  much  vague  remark,  or  than  any  commentary  now 
possible  to  give.'  Through  the  kind  permission  of  the 
Librarian  of  Dr.  Williams's  Library,  where  the  Crabb  Robinson 
MSS.  are  preserved,  I  am  able  to  give,  for  the  first  time,  an 
accurate  and  complete  text  of  every  reference  to  Blake  in 
the  Diary,  Letters,  and  Reminiscences,  which  have  hitherto 
been  printed  only  in  part,  and  with  changes  as  well  as 
omissions.  In  an  entry  in  his  Diary  for  May  13,  1848,  Crabb 
Robinson  says  :  '  It  is  strange  that  I,  who  have  no  imagination, 
nor  any  power  beyond  that  of  a  logical  understanding,  should 
yet  have  great  respect  for  the  mystics.'  This  respect  for  the 
mystics ,  to  which  we  owe  the  notes  on  Blake,  was  part  of  an 
inexhaustible  curiosity  in  human  things,  and  in  things  of  the 
mind,  which  made  of  Crabb  Robinson  the  most  searching  and 
significant  reporter  of  the  nineteenth  century.  Others  may 
have  understood  Blake  better  than  he  did,  but  no  one  else  was 
so  attentive  to  his  speech,  and  thus  so  faithful  an  interpreter 
of  his  meaning. 

In  copying  from  the  MS.  I  have  followed  the  spelling,  not 
however  preserving  abbreviations  such  as  'Bl:'  for  'Blake,' 
due  merely  to  haste,  and  I  have  modified  the  punctuation  and 
added  commas  of  quotation  only  when  the  writer's  carelessness 
in  these  matters  was  likely  to  be  confusing.  Otherwise  the 
transcript  is  literal  and  verbatim,  and  I  have  added  in  footnotes 
any  readings  of  possible  interest  which  have  been  crossed  out 
in  the  manuscript. 


(1)  EKOM  CKABB  KOBINSON'S  DIARY 

1825 
December 

10  ...  Dined  with  Aders.  A  very  remarkable 
and  interesting  evening.  The  party  Blake  the 
painter  and  Linnell — also  a  painter  and  engraver — 
to  dinner.  In  the  evening  came  Miss  Denman 
and  Miss  Flaxman. 

Wth  December  1825 
BLAKE 

I  will  put  down  as  they  occur  to  me  without 
method  all  I  can  recollect  of  the  conversation  of 
this  remarkable  man.  Shall  I  call  him  Artist  or 
Genius — or  Mystic — or  Madman  ?  Probably  he 
is  all.  He  has  a  most  interesting  appearance. 
He  is  now  old — pale  with  a  Socratic  countenance, 
and  an  expression  of  great  sweetness,  but  bordering 
on  weakness — except  when  his  features  are  ani- 
mated by  x  expression,  and  then  he  has  an  air  of 
inspiration  about  him.  The  conversation  was  on 

1  '  Any '  crossed  out. 

253 


254  WILLIAM  BLAKE 

art,  and  on  poetry,  and  on  religion ;  but  it  was  my 
object,  and  I  was  successful,  in  drawing  him  out, 
and  in  so  getting  from  him  an  avowal  of  his 
peculiar  sentiments.  I  was  aware  before  of  the 
nature  of  his  impressions,  or  I  should  at  times 
have  been  at  a  loss  to  understand  him.  He  was 
shewn  soon  after  he  entered  the  room  some  com- 
positions of  Mrs.  Aders  which  he  cordially  praised. 
And  he  brought  with  him  an  engraving  of  his 
Canterbury  Pilgrims  for  Aders.  One  of  the  figures 
ressembled  one  in  one  of  Aders's  pictures.  '  They 
say  I  stole  it  from  this  picture,  but  I  did  it  20 
years  before  I  knew  of  the  picture — however,  in 
my  youth  I  was  always  studying  this  kind  of 
paintings.  No  wonder  there  is  a  resemblence.' 
In  this  he  seemed  to  explain  humanly  what  he  had 
done,  but  he  at  another  time  spoke  of  his  paintings 
as  being  what  he  had  seen  in  his  visions.  And 
when  he  said  my  visions  it  was  in  the  ordinary 
unemphatic  tone  in  which  we  speak  of  trivial 
matters  that  every  one  understands  and  cares 
nothing  about.  In  the  same  tone  he  said  re- 
peatedly, the  '  Spirit  told  me.'  I  took  occasion  to 
say — You  use  the  same  word  as  Socrates  used. 
What  resemblance  do  you  suppose  is  there  between 
your  spirit  and  the  spirit  of  Socrates  ?  '  The  same 
as  between  our  countenance.'  He  paused  and 
added — '  I  was  Socrates.'  And  then,  as  if  cor- 
recting himself,  '  A  sort  of  brother.  I  must  have 
had  conversations  with  him.  So  I  had  with  Jesus 


CRABB  ROBINSON'S  DIARY      255 

Christ.     I  have  an  obscure  recollection  of  having 
been  with  both  of  them.' 

It  was  before  this,  that  I  had  suggested  on  very 
obvious  philosophical  grounds  the  impossibility  of 
supposing  an  immortal  being  created — an  eternity 
a  parte  post  without  an  eternity  a  parte  ante.  This 
is  an  obvious  truth  I  have  been  many  (perhaps 
30)  years  fully  aware  of.  His  eye  brightened 
on  my  saying  this,  and  he  eagerly  concurred — '  To 
be  sure  it  is  impossible.  We  are  all  co-existent 
with  God — members  of  the  Divine  body.  We  are 
all  partakers  of  the  Divine  nature.'  In  this,  by 
the  bye,  Blake  has  but  adopted  an  ancient  Greek 
idea — query  of  Plato  ?  As  connected  with  this  idea 
I  will  mention  here  (though  it  formed  part  of  our 
talk,  walking  homeward)  that  on  my  asking  in 
what  light  he  viewed  the  great  question  concerning 
the  Divinity  of  Jesus  Christ,  he  said — 'He  is  the 
only  God!  But  then  he  added — '  And  so  am  I  and 
so  are  you.'  Now  he  had  just  before  (and  this 
occasioned  my  question)  been  speaking  of  the 
errors  of  Jesus  Christ — He  was  wrong  in  suffering 
Himself  to  be  crucified.  He  should  not  have 
attacked  the  Government.  He  had  no  business 
with  such  matters.  On  my  inquiring  how  he 
reconciled  this  with  the  sanctity  and  divine 
qualities  of  Jesus,  he  said  He  was  not  then  become 
the  Father.  Connecting  as  well  as  one  can  these 
fragmentary  sentiments,  it  would  be  hard  to  give 
Blake's  station  between  Christianity,  Platonism, 


256  WILLIAM  BLAKE 

and  Spinosism.  Yet  he  professes  to  be  very  hostile 
to  Plato,  and  reproaches  Wordsworth  with  being 
not  a  Christian  but  a  Platonist. 

It  is  one  of  the  subtle  remarks  of  Hume  on 
certain  religious  speculations  that  the  tendency  of 
them  is  to  make  men  indifferent  to  whatever  takes 
place  by  destroying  all  ideas  of  good  and  evil.  I 
took  occasion  to  apply  this  remark  to  something 
Blake  said.  If  so,  I  said,  there  is  no  use  in  dis- 
cipline or  education,  no  difference  between  good 
and  evil.  He  hastily  broke  in  on  me — '  There  is 
no  use  in  education.  I  hold  it  wrong.  It  is  the 
great  sin.1  It  is  eating  of  the  tree  of  the  knowledge 
of  good  and  evil.  That  was  the  fault  of  Plato — 
he  knew  of  nothing  but  of  the  virtues  and  vices 
and  good  and  evil.  There  is  nothing  in  all  that. 
Every  thing  is  good  in  God's  eyes.'  On  my  putting 
the  obvious  question — Is  there  nothing  absolutely 
evil  in  what  men  do  ?  'I  am  no  judge  of  that. 
Perhaps  not  in  God's  Eyes.'  Though  on  this  and 
other  occasions  he  spoke  as  if  he  denied  altogether 
the  existence  of  evil,  and  as  if  we  had  nothing  to  do 
with  right  and  wrong.  It  being  sufficient  to  con- 
sider all  things  as  alike  the  work  of  God.  [I  in- 
terposed with  the  German  word  objectively,  which 
he  approved  of.]  Yet  at  other  times  he  spoke  of 
error  as  being  in  heaven.  I  asked  about  the  moral 
character  of  Dante  in  writing  his  Vision :  was  he 
pure  ?  ' Pure'  said  Blake.  '  Do  you  think  there 

1  '  By  which  evil '  crossed  out. 


CRABB  ROBINSON'S  DIARY      257 

is  any  purity  in  God's  eyes  ?  The  angels  in 
heaven  are  no  more  so  than  we — "  he  chargeth  his 
angels  with  folly." '  He  afterwards  extended  this 
to  the  Supreme  Being — he  is  liable  to  error  too. 
Did  he  not  repent  him  that  he  had  made  Nineveh? 

It  is  easier  to  repeat  the  personal  remarks  of 
Blake  than  these  metaphysical  speculations  so 
nearly  allied  to  the  most  opposite  systems.  He 
spoke  with  seeming  complacency  of  himself — said 
he  acted  by  command.  The  spirit  said  to  him, 
'  Blake,  be  an  artist  and  nothing  else.'  In  this 
there  is  felicity.  His  eye  glistened  while  he  spoke 
of  the  joy  of  devoting  himself  solely  to  divine  art. 
'  Art  is  inspiration.  When  Michael  Angelo  or 
Raphael  or  Mr.  Flaxman  does  any  of  his  fine 
things,  he  does  them  in  the  spirit.'  Blake  said,  '  I 
should  be  sorry  if  I  had  any  earthly  fame,  for 
whatever  natural  glory  a  man  has  is  so  much 
detracted  from  his  spiritual  glory.  I  wish  to  do 
nothing  for  profit.  I  wish  to  live  for  art.  I  want 
nothing  whatever.  I  am  quite  happy.' 

Among  the  l  unintelligible  sentiments  which  he 
was  continually  expressing  is  his  distinction  be- 
tween the  natural  and  the  spiritual  world.  The 
natural  world  must  be  consumed.  Incidentally 
Swedenborg  was  spoken  of.  He  was  a  divine 
teacher — he  has  done  much  good,  and  will  do 
much  good — he  has  corrected  many  errors  of 
Popery,  and  also  of  Luther  and  Calvin.  Yet  he 

1  'More  remarkable' crossed  out. 
R 


258  WILLIAM  BLAKE 

also  said  that  Swedenborg  was  wrong  in  endeavour- 
ing to  explain  to  the  rational  faculty  what  the 
reason  cannot  comprehend:  he  should  have  left 
that.  As  Blake  mentioned  Swedenborg  and  Dante 
together  I  wished  to  know  whether  he  considered 
their  visions  of  the  same  kind.  As  far  as  I  could 
collect,  he  does.  Dante  he  said  was  the  greater 
poet.  He  had  political  objects.  Yet  this,  though 
wrong,  does  not  appear  in  Blake's  mind  to  affect 
the  truth  of  the  vision.  Strangely  inconsistent  with 
this  was  the  language  of  Blake  about  Wordsworth. 
Wordsworth  he  thinks  is  no  Christian  but  a 
Platonist.  He  asked  me,  '  Does  he  believe  in  the 
Scriptures  ? '  On  my  answering  in  the  affirmative 
he  said  he  had  been  much  pained  by  reading  the 
introduction  to  the  Excursion.  It  brought  on  a 
fit  of  illness.  The  passage  was  produced  and 
read: 

'  Jehovah — with  his  thunder,  and  the  choir 
Of  shouting  Angels,  and  the  empyreal  thrones, 
I  pass  them  unalarmed.' 

This  pass  them  unalarmed  greatly  offended 
Blake.  'Does  Mr.  Wordsworth  think  his  mind 
can  surpass  Jehovah  ? '  I  tried  to  twist  this  passage 
into  a  sense  corresponding  with  Blake's  own 
theories,  but  filled  [sic  =  failed],  and  Wordsworth 
was  finally  set  down  as  a  pagan.  But  still  with 
great  praise  as  the  greatest  poet  of  the  age. 

Jacob    Boehmen  was  spoken  of   as  a  divinely 


CRABB  ROBINSON'S  DIARY      259 

inspired  man.  Blake  praised,  too,  the  figures  in 
Law's  translation  as  being  very  beautiful. 
Michael  Angelo  could  not  have  done  better. 
Though  he  spoke  of  his  happiness,  he  spoke  of  past 
sufferings,  and  of  sufferings  as  necessary.  '  There 
is  suffering  in  heaven,  for  where  there  is  the  capacity 
of  enjoyment,  there  is  the  capacity  of  pain.' 

I  have  been  interrupted  by  a  call  from  Talfourd 
in  writing  this  account — and  I  can  not  now  recol- 
lect any  distinct  remarks — but  as  Blake  has  invited 
me  to  go  and  see  him  I  shall  possibly  have  an 
opportunity  again  of  noting  what  he  says,  and  I 
may  be  able  hereafter  to  throw  connection,  if  not 
system,  into  what  I  have  written  above. 

I  feel  great  admiration  and  respect  for  him — he 
is  certainly  a  most  amiable  man — a  good  creature 
— and  of  his  poetical  and  pictorial  genius  there  is 
no  doubt,  I  believe,  in  the  minds  of  judges. 
Wordsworth  and  Lamb  like  his  poems,  and  the 
Aders  his  paintings. 

A  few  other  detached  thoughts  occur  to  me. 

Bacon,  Locke,  and  Newton  are  the  three  great 
teachers  of  Atheism  or  of  Satan's  doctrine. 

Every  thing  is  Atheism  which  assumes  the 
reality  of  the  natural  and  unspiritual  world. 

Irving.  He  is  a  highly  gifted  man — he  is  a 
sent  man — but  they  who  are  sent  sometimes1  go 
further  than  they  ought. 

1  '  Exceed  their  commission  '  crossed  out. 


260  WILLIAM  BLAKE 

Dante  saw  Devils  where  I  see  none.  I  see  only- 
good.  I  saw  nothing  but  good  in  Calvin's  house — 
better  than  in  Luther's ;  he  had  harlots. 

Swederiborg.  Parts  of  his  scheme  are  dangerous. 
His  sexual  religion  is  dangerous. 

I  do  not  believe  that  the  world  is  round.  I 
believe  it  is  quite  flat.  I  objected  the  circum- 
navigation. We  were  called  to  dinner  at  the 
moment,  and  I  lost  the  reply. 

The  Sun.  '  I  have  conversed  with  the  Spiritual 
Sun — I  saw  him  on  Primrose-hill.  He  said,  "  Do 
you  take  me  for  the  Greek  Apollo  ? "  "  No,"  I 
said,  "  that "  [and  Blake  pointed  to  the  sky]  "  that 
is  the  Greek  Apollo.  He  is  Satan." ' 

'  I  know  what  is  true  by  internal  conviction. 
A  doctrine  is  told  me — my  heart  says  it  must  be 
true.'  I  corroborated  this  by  remarking  on  the 
impossibility  of  the  unlearned  man  judging  of 
what  are  called  the  external  evidences  of  religion, 
in  which  he  heartily  concurred. 

I  regret  that  I  have  been  unable  to  do  more 
than  set  down  these  seeming  idle  and  rambling 
sentences.  The  tone  and  manner  are  incommuni- 
cable. There  is  a  natural  sweetness  and  gentility 
about  Blake  which  are  delightful.  And  when  he 
is  not  referring  to  his  Visions  he  talks  sensibly 
and  acutely. 

His  friend  Linnel  seems  a  great  admirer. 

Perhaps  the  best  thing  he  said  was  his  com- 
parison of  moral  with  natural  evil.  'Who  shall 


CKABB  ROBINSON'S  DIARY      261 

say  what  God  thinks  evil  ?  That  is  a  wise  tale  of 
the  Mahometans — of  the  Angel  of  the  Lord  that 
murdered  the  infant '  [alluding  to  the  Hermit  of 
Parnel,  I  suppose].  '  Is  not  every  infant  that  dies  of 
disease  in  effect  murdered  by  an  angel  ? ' 

17th  December.  For  the  sake  of  connection  I 
will  here  insert  a  minute  of  a  short  call  I  this 
morning  made  on  Blake.  He  dwells  in  Fountain 
Court  in  the  Strand.  I  found  him  in  a  small 
room,  which  seems  to  be  both  a  working-room  and 
a  bedroom.  Nothing  could  exceed  the  squalid  air 
both  of  the  apartment  and  his  dress,  but  in  spite 
of  dirt — I  might  say  filth — an  air  of  natural 
gentility  is  diffused  over  him.  And  his  wife,  not- 
withstanding the  same  offensive  character  of  her 
dress  and  appearance,  has  a  good  expression  of 
countenance,  so  that  I  shall  have  a  pleasure  in 
calling  on  and  conversing  with  these  worthy 
people. 

But  I  fear  I  shall  not  make  any  progress  in 
ascertaining  his  opinions  and  feelings — that  there 
being  really  no  system  or  connection  in  his  mind, 
all  his  future  conversation  will  be  but  varieties  of 
wildness  and  incongruity. 

I  found  [sic]  at  work  on  Dante.  The  book 
(Gary)  and  his  sketches  both  before  him.  He 
shewed  me  his  designs,  of  which  I  have  nothing  to 
say  but  that  they  evince  a  power  of  grouping  and 
of  throwing  grace  and  interest  over  conceptions 


262  WILLIAM  BLAKE 

most  monstrous  and  disgusting,  which  I  should 
not  have  anticipated. 

Our  conversation  began  about  Dante.  '  He  was 
an  "  Atheist,"  a  mere  politician  busied  about  this 
world  as  Milton  was,  till  in  his  old  age  he  returned 
back  to  God  whom  he  had  had  in  his  childhood/ 

I  tried  to  get  out  from  Blake  that  he  meant  this 
charge  only  in  a  higher  sense,  and  not  using  the 
word  Atheism  in  its  popular  meaning.  But  he 
would  not  allow  this.  Though  when  he  in  like 
manner  charged  Locke  with  Atheism  and  I  re- 
marked that  Locke  wrote  on  the  evidences  of  piety 
and  lived  a  virtuous  life,  he  had  nothing  to  reply 
to  me  nor  reiterated  the  charge  of  wilful  deception. 
I  admitted  that  Locke's  doctrine  leads  to  Atheism, 
and  this  seemed  to  satisfy  him.  From  this  subject 
we  passed  over  to  that  of  good  and  evil,  in  which 
he  repeated  his  former  assertions  more  decidedly. 
He  allowed,  indeed,  that  there  is  error,  mistake, 
etc.,  and  if  these  be  evil — then  there  is  evil,  but 
these  are  only  negations.  Nor  would  he  admit 
that  any  education  should  be  attempted  except 
that  of  cultivation  of  the  imagination  and  fine  arts. 
'What  are  called  the  vices  in  the  natural  world 
are  the  highest  sublimities  in  the  spiritual  world.' 
When  I  asked  whether  if  he  had  been  a  father  he 
would  not  have  grieved  if  his  child  had  become 
vicious  or  a  great  criminal,  he  answered,  *  I  must 
not  regard  when  I  am  endeavouring  to  think 
rightly  my  own  any  more  than  other  people's 


CRABB  ROBINSON'S  DIARY      263 

weaknesses.'  And  when  I  again  remarked  that 
this  doctrine  puts  an  end  to  all  exertion  or  even 
wish  to  change  anything,  he  had  no  reply.  We 
spoke  of  the  Devil,  and  I  observed  that  when  a 
child  I  thought  the  Manichsean  doctrine  or  that 
of  the  two  principles  a  rational  one.  He  assented 
to  this,  and  in  confirmation  asserted  that  he  did 
not  believe  in  the  omnipotence  of  God.  'The 
language  of  the  Bible  on  that  subject  is  only  poet- 
ical or  allegorical.'  Yet  soon  after  he  denied  that 
the  natural  world  is  anything.  '  It  is  all  nothing, 
and  Satan's  empire  is  the  empire  of  nothing.' 

He  reverted  soon  to  his  favourite  expression, 
my  Visions.  '  I  saw  Milton  in  imagination, 
and  he  told  me  to  beware  of  being  misled  by  his 
Paradise  Lost.  In  particular  he  wished  me  to 
show  the  falsehood  of  his  doctrine  that  the 
pleasures  of  sex  arose  from  the  fall.  The  fall  could 
not  produce  any  pleasure.'  I  answered,  the  fall 
produced  a  state  of  evil  in  which  there  was  a  mix- 
ture of  good  or  pleasure.  And  in  that  sense  the 
fall  may  be  said  to  produce  the  pleasure.  But  he 
replied  that  the  fall  produced  only  generation  and 
death.  And  then  he  went  off  upon  a  rambling  state 
of  a  union  of  sexes  in  man  as  in  Ovid,  an  an- 
drogynous state,  in  which  I  could  not  follow  him. 

As  he  spoke  of  Milton's  appearing  to  him,  I  asked 
whether  he  resembled  the  prints  of  him.  He 
answered,  '  All.'  Of  what  age  did  he  appear  to  be  ? 
'  Various  ages — sometimes  a  very  old  man.'  He 


264  WILLIAM  BLAKE 

spoke  of  Milton  as  being  at  one  time  a  sort  of 
classical  Atheist,  and  of  Dante  as  being  now  with 
God. 

Of  the  faculty  of  Vision,  he  spoke  as  one  he  has 
had  from  early  infancy.  He  thinks  all  men 
partake  of  it,  but  it  is  lost  by  not  being  cultivated. 
And  he  eagerly  assented  to  a  remark  I  made,  that 
all  men  have  all  faculties  to  a  greater  or  less  degree. 
I  am  to  renew  my  visits,  and  to  read  Wordsworth 
to  him,  of  whom  he  seems  to  entertain  a  high  idea. 

[Here  R.  has  added  vide  p.  174,  i.e.  Dec.  24, 
below.] 

Sunday  llth.  The  greater  part  of  the  forenoon 
was  spent  in  writing  the  preceding  account  of  my 
interview  with  Blake  in  which  I  was  interrupted 
by  a  call  from  Talfourd.  .  .  . 

17th.  Made  a  visit  to  Blake  of  which  I  have 
written  fully  in  a  preceding  page. 

2Qth.  .  .  .  Hundleby  took  coffee  with  me  tete  &  ttte. 
We  talked  of  his  personal  concerns,  of  Wordsworth, 
whom  I  can't  make  him  properly  enjoy  ;  of  Blake, 
whose  peculiarities  he  can  as  little  relish.  .  .  . 

Saturday  2±th.  A  call  on  Blake.  My  third 
interview.  I  read  him  Wordsworth's  incompar- 
able ode,  which  he  heartily  enjoyed.  The  same 
half  crazy  crotchets  about  the  two  worlds — the 
eternal  repetition  of  what  must  in  time  become 
tiresome.  Again  he  repeated  to  day,  '  I  fear 


CRABB  ROBINSON'S  DIARY      265 

Wordsworth  loves  Nature — and  Nature  is  the 
work  of  the  Devil.  The  Devil  is  in  us,  as  far  as 
we  are  Nature.'  On  my  enquiring  whether  the 
Devil  would  not  be  destroyed  by  God  as  being  of 
less  power,  he  denied  that  God  has  any  power — 
asserted  that  the  Devil  is  eternally  created  not  by 
God,  but  by  God's  permission.  And  when  I 
objected  that  permission  implies  power  to  prevent, 
he  did  not  seem  to  understand  me.  It  was  re- 
marked that  the  parts  of  Wordworth's  ode  which  he 
most  enjoyed  were  the  most  obscure  and  those  I 
the  least  like  and  comprehend.  .  .  . 

January  1826 

6^.  A  call  on  Blake.  I  hardly  feel  it  worth 
while  to  write  down  his  conversation,  it  is  so  much 
a  repetition  of  his  former  talk.  He  was  very 
cordial  to-day.  I  had  procured  him  two  subscrip- 
tions for  his  Job  from  Geo.  Procter  and  Bas. 
Montague.  I  paid  £1  on  each.  This,  probably, 
put  him  in  spirits,  more  than  he  was  aware  of — he 
spoke  of  his  being  richer  than  ever  on  having 
learned  to  know  me,  and  he  told  Mrs.  A.  he  and  I 
were  nearly  of  an  opinion.  Yet  I  have  practised  no 
deception  intentionally,  unless  silence  be  so.  He 
renewed  his  complaints,  blended  with  his  admira- 
tion of  Wordsworth.  The  oddest  thing  he  said 
was  that  he  had  been  commanded  to  do  certain 
things,  that  is,  to  write  about  Milton,  and  that  he 


266  WILLIAM   BLAKE 

was  applauded  for  refusing — he  struggled  with  the 
Angels  and  was  victor.  His  wife  joined  in  the 
conversation.  .  .  . 

8th. . . .  Then  took  tea  with  Basil  Montague,  Mrs. 
M.  there.  A  short  chat  about  Coleridge,  Irving, 
etc.  She  admires  Blake — Encore  une  excellence 
Id,  de  plus.  .  .  . 

February 

18th.  Jos.  Wedd  breakfasted  with  me.  Then 
called  on  Blake.  An  amusing  chat  with  him,  but 
still  no  novelty.  The  same  round  of  extravagant 
and  mad  doctrines,  which  I  shall  not  now  repeat,  but 
merely  notice  their  application. 

He  gave  me,  copied  out  by  himself,  Wordsworth's 
preface  to  his  Excursion.  At  the  end  he  has  added 
this  note : — 

'  Solomon,  when  he  married  Pharaoh's  daughter, 
became  a  convert  to  the  Heathen  Mythology, 
talked  exactly  in  this  way  of  Jehovah  as  a  very 
inferior  object  of  man's  contemplations ;  he  also 
passed  him  by  unalarmed,  and  was  permitted. 
Jehovah  dropped  a  tear  and  followed  him  by  his 
Spirit  into  the  abstract  void.  It  is  called  the  divine 
Mercy.  Satan  dwells  in  it,  but  mercy  does  not 
dwell  in  him.' 

Of  Wordsworth  he  talked  as  before.  Some  of 
his  writings  proceed  from  the  Holy  Ghost,  but  then 
others  are  the  work  of  the  Devil.  However,  I 


CRABB  ROBINSON'S  DIARY      267 

found  on  this  subject  Blake's  language  more  in 
conformity  with  Orthodox  Christianity  than  before. 
He  talked  of  the  being  under  the  direction  of  Self; 
and  of  Reason  as  the  creature  of  man  and  opposed 
to  God's  grace.  And  warmly  declared  that  all  he 
knew  was  in  the  Bible,  but  then  he  understands  by 
the  Bible  the  spiritual  sense.  For  as  to  the 
natural  sense,  that  Voltaire  was  commissioned  by 
God  to  expose.  '  I  have  had  much  intercourse  with 
Voltaire,  and  he  said  to  me  I  blasphemed  the  Son 
of  Man,  and  it  shall  be  forgiven  me.  But  they  (the 
enemies  of  Voltaire)  blasphemed  the  Holy  Ghost 
in  me,  and  it  shall  not  be  forgiven  them.'  I  asked 
in  what  language  Voltaire  spoke — he  gave  an 
ingenious  answer.  'To  my  sensation  it  was 
English.  It  was  like  the  touch  of  a  musical  key. 
He  touched  it  probably  French,  but  to  my  ear  it 
became  English.'  I  spoke  again  of  the  form  of  the 
persons  who  appear  to  him.  Asked  why  he  did 
not  draw  them,  '  It  is  not  worth  while.  There  are 
so  many,  the  labour  would  be  too  great.  Besides 
there  would  be  no  use.  As  to  Shakespeare,  he  is 
exactly  like  the  old  engraving — which  is  called  a 
bad  one.  I  think  it  very  good.' 

I  enquired  about  his  writings.  '  I  have  written 
more  than  Voltaire  or  Rousseau — six  or  seven 
epic  poems  as  long  as  Homer,  and  20  tragedies 
as  long  as  Macbeth.'  He  showed  me  his  Vision 
(for  so  it  may  be  called)  of  Genesis — 'as  under- 
stood by  a  Christian  Visionary,'  in  which  in  a 


268  WILLIAM  BLAKE 

style  resembling  the  Bible  the  spirit  is  given. 
He  read  a  passage  at  random.  It  was  striking. 
He  will  not  print  any  more.1  '  I  write,'  he  says, 
'  when  commanded  by  the  spirits,  and  the  moment 
I  have  written  I  see  the  words  fly  about  the 
room  in  all  directions.  It  is  then  published,  and 
the  spirits  can  read.  My  MSS.  of  no  further  use. 
I  have  been  tempted  to  burn  my  MSS.,  but  my 
wife  won't  let  me.'  She  is  right,  said  I — and  you 
have  written  these,  not  from  yourself,  but  by  a 
higher  order.  The  MSS.  are  theirs  and  your  pro- 
perty. You  cannot  tell  what  purpose  they  may 
answer — unforeseen  to  you.  He  liked  this,  and 
said  he  would  not  destroy  them.  His  philosophy 
he  repeated — denying  causation,  asserting  every- 
thing to  be  the  work  of  God  or  the  Devil — that 
there  is  a  constant  falling  off  from  God — angels 
becoming  devils.  Every  man  has  a  devil  in  him, 
and  the  conflict  is  eternal  between  a  man's  self 
and  God,  etc.  etc.  etc.  He  told  me  my  copy  of 
his  songs  would  be  5  guineas,  and  was  pleased 
by  my  manner  of  receiving  this  information.  He 
spoke  of  his  horror  of  money — of  his  turning  pale 
when  money  had  been  offered  him,  etc.  etc.  etc. 

May 

Thursday  llth.    Calls  this  morning  on  Blake, on 
Thornton  [etc.]  .  .  . 

12th . . .  Tea  and  supper  at  home.    The  Flaxmans, 

1  '  For  the  writer '  crossed  out. 


CRABB  ROBINSON'S  DIARY      269 

Masquer iers  (a  Miss  Forbes),  Blake,  and  Sutton 
Sharpe. 

On  the  whole  the  evening  went  off  tolerably. 
Masquerier  not  precisely  the  man  to  enjoy  Blake, 
who  was,  however,  not  in  an  exalted  state.  Allu- 
sions only  to  his  particular  notions  while  Mas- 
querier commented  on  his  opinions  as  if  they  were 
those  of  a  man  of  ordinary  notions.  Blake  asserted 
that  the  oldest  painter  poets  were  the  best.  Do 
you  deny  all  progression  ?  says  Masquerier.  '  Oh 
yes ! '  I  doubt  whether  Flaxman  sufficiently 
tolerates  Blake.  But  Blake  appreciates  Flaxman 
as  he  ought.  Blake  relished  my  Stone  drawings. 
They  staid  till  eleven. 

Blake  is  more  and  more  convinced  that  Words- 
worth worships  nature  and  is  not  a  Bible  Christian. 
I  have  sent  him  the  Sketches.  We  shall  see 
whether  they  convert  him. 

June 

13th.  Another  idle  day.  Called  early  on 
Blake.  He  was  as  wild  as  ever,  with  no  great 
novelty,  except  that  he  confessed  a  practical  notion 
which  would  do  him  more  injury  than  any  other  I 
have  heard  from  him.  He  says  that  from  the 
Bible  he  has  learned  that  eine  Gemeinschaft  der 
Frauen  statt  finden  sollte.  When  I  objected  that 
Ehestand  seems  to  be  a  divine  institution,  he 
referred  to  the  Bible — '  that  from  the  beginning  it 


270  WILLIAM  BLAKE 

was  not  so.'  He  talked  as  usual  of  the  spirits, 
asserted  that  he  had  committed  many  murders, 
that  reason  is  the  only  evil  or  sin,  and  that  careless, 
gay  people  are  better  than  those  who  think,  etc. 
etc.  etc. 

December 

Thursday  7th.  I  sent  Britt.  to  enquire  after  Mr. 
Flaxman's  health,  etc.,  and  was  engaged  looking 
over  the  Term  Eeports  while  he  was  gone.  On 
his  return,  he  brought  the  melancholy  intelligence 
of  his  death  early  in  the  morning ! ! !  The  country 
has  lost  one  of  its  greatest  and  best  of  men.  As 
an  artist  he  has  spread  the  fame  of  the  country 
beyond  any  others  of  his  age.  As  a  man  he  ex- 
hibited a  rare  specimen  of  Christian  and  moral 
excellence. 

I  walked  out  and  called  at  Mr.  Soane's.  He 
was  from  home.  I  then  called  on  Blake,  desirous 
to  see  how,  with  his  peculiar  feelings  and  opinions, 
he  would  receive  the  intelligence.  It  was  much 
as  I  expected — he  had  himself  been  very  ill  during 
the  summer,  and  his  first  observation  was  with  a 
smile — '  I  thought  I  should  have  gone  first.'  He  then 
said,  '  I  cannot  consider  death  as  anything  but l  a 
removing  from  one  room  to  another.'  One  thing 
led  to  another,  and  he  fell  into  his  wild  rambling 
way  of  talk.  '  Men  are  born  with  a  devil  and  an 
1  '  A  passage  from '  crossed  out. 


CRABB  ROBINSON'S  DIARY     271 

angel,'  but  this  he  himself  interpreted  body  and 
soul.  Of  the  Old  Testament  he  seemed  to  think 
not  favourably.  '  Christ,'  said  he,  '  took  much 
after  his  mother  (the  law),  and  in  that  respect  was 
one  of  the  worst  of  men.'  On  my  requiring  an 
explanation,  he  said,  'There  was  his  turning  the 
money  changers  out  of  the  Temple.  He  had  no 
right  to  do  that.'  Blake  then  declared  against 
those  who  sat  in  judgement  on  others.  'I  have 
never  known  a  very  bad  man  who  had  not  some- 
thing very  good  about  him.'  He  spoke  of  the 
Atonement.  Said,  '  It  is  a  horrible  doctrine.  If 
another  man  pay  your  debt,  I  do  not  forgive  it,'  etc. 
etc.  etc.  He  produced  Sintram  by  Fouque' — '  This 
is  better  than  my  things.' 


1827 
February 

Friday,  2nd.  Gotzenberger,  the  young  painter 
from  Germany,  called  on  me,  and  I  accompanied  him 
to  Blake.  We  looked  over  Blake's  Dante.  Gotzen- 
berger seemed  highly  gratified  by  the  designs, 
and  Mrs.  Aders  says  Gotzenberger  considers  Blake 
as  the  first  and  Flaxman  as  the  second  man  he 
had  seen  in  England.  The  conversation  was  slight 
— I  was  interpreter  between  them.  And  nothing 
remarkable  was  said  by  Blake — he  was  interested 
apparently  by  Gotzenberger.  .  .  . 


272  WILLIAM  BLAKE 

1828 
January 

8th.  Breakfasted  with  Shott — Talfourd  and 
B.  Field  there.  Walked  with  Field  to  Mrs. 
Blake.  The  poor  old  lady  was  more  affected  than 
I  expected,  yet  she  spoke  of  her  husband  as  dying 
like  an  angel.  She  is  the  housekeeper  of  Linnell 
the  painter  and  engraver,  and  at  present  her 
services  might  well  pay  for  her  board.  A  few  of 
her  husband's  works  are  all  her  property.  We 
found  that  the  Job  is  Linnell's  property,  and  the 
print  of  Chaucer's  pilgrimage  hers.  Therefore 
Field  bought  a  proof  and  I  two  prints  at  2£ 
guineas  each.  I  mean  one  for  Lamb.  Mrs. 
Blake  is  to  look  out  some  engravings  for  me 
hereafter.  . 


(2)  FKOM  A  LETTER  OF  CRABB  ROBINSON 
TO  DOROTHY  WORDSWORTH 

IN  a  letter  to  Dorothy  Wordsworth,  not  dated,  but 
bearing  the  postmark  of  February  20,  1826,  there 
is  the  following  reference  to  Blake.  No  earlier 
reference  to  him  occurs  in  the  letter,  in  spite  of 
the  sentence  which  follows  : — 

'I    have    above    mentioned    Blake.      I    forget 


CRABB  ROBINSON'S  DIARY,  ETC.    273 

whether  I  ever  mentioned  to  you  this  very  in- 
teresting man,  with  whom  I  am  now  become  ac- 
quainted. Were  the  "  Memorials  "  at  my  hand,  I 
should  quote  a  fine  passage  in  the  Sonnet  on 
the  Cologne  Cathedral  as  applicable  to  the  con- 
templation of  this  singular  being. 

'  I  gave  your  brother  some  poems  in  MS.  by 
him,  and  they  interested  him — as  well  they  might, 
for  there  is  an  affinity  between  them,  as  there  is 
between  the  regulated  imagination  of  a  wise  poet 
and  the  incoherent  dreams  of  a  poet.  Blake  is  an 
engraver  by  trade,  a  painter  and  a  poet  also,  whose 
works  have  been  subject  of  derision  to  men  in 
general;  but  he  has  a  few  admirers,  and  some  of 
eminence  have  eulogised  his  designs.  He  has 
lived  in  obscurity  and  poverty,  to  which  the  con- 
stant hallucinations  in  which  he  lives  have  doomed 
him.  I  do  not  mean  to  give  you  a  detailed  account 
of  him.  A  few  words  will  suffice  to  inform  you 
of  what  class  he  is.  He  is  not  so  much  a  disciple 
of  Jacob  Bohmen  and  Swedenborg  as  a  fellow 
Visionary.  He  lives,  as  they  did,  in  a  world  of 
his  own,  enjoying  constant  intercourse  with  the 
world  of  spirits.  He  receives  visits  from  Shake- 
speare, Milton,  Dante,  Voltaire,  etc.  etc.  etc.,  and 
has  given  me  repeatedly  their  very  words  in  their 
conversations.  His  paintings  are  copies  of  what 
he  saw  in  his  Visions.  His  books  (and  his  MSS. 
are  immense  in  quantity)  are  dictations  from  the 
spirits.  He  told  me  yesterday  that  when  he  writes 

s 


274  WILLIAM   BLAKE 

it  is  for  the  spirits  only;  he  sees  the  words  fly 
about  the  room  the  moment  he  has  put  them  on 
paper,  and  his  book  is  then  published.  A  man  so 
favoured,  of  course,  has  sources  of  wisdom  and 
truth  peculiar  to  himself.  I  will  not  pretend  to 
give  you  an  account  of  his  religious  and  philo- 
sophical opinions.  They  are  a  strange  compound 
of  Christianity,  Spinozism,  and  Platonism.  I  must 
confine  myself  to  what  he  has  said  about  your 
brother's  works,  and l  I  fear  this  may  lead  me  far 
enough  to  fatigue  you  in  following  me.  After 
what  I  have  said,  Mr.  W.  will  not  be  flattered  by 
knowing  that  Blake  deems  him  the  only  poet  of 
the  age,  nor  much  alarmed  by  hearing  that,  like 
Muley  Moloch,  Blake  thinks  that  he  is  often  in 
his  works  an  Atheist.  Now,  according  to  Blake, 
Atheism  consists  in  worshipping  the  natural  world, 
which  same  natural  world,  properly  speaking,  is 
nothing  real,  but  a  mere  illusion  produced  by 
Satan.  Milton  was  for  a  great  part  of  his  life 
an  Atheist,  and  therefore  has  fatal  errors  in  his 
Paradise  Lost,  which  he  has  often  begged  Blake 
to  confute.  Dante  (though  now  with  God)  lived 
and  died  an  Atheist.  He  was  the  slave  of  the 
world  and  time.  But  Dante  and  Wordsworth,  in 
spite  of  their  Atheism,  were  inspired  by  the  Holy 
Ghost.  Indeed,  all  real  poetry  is  the  work  of  the 
Holy  Ghost,  and  Wordsworth's  poems  (a  large  pro- 

1  '  And  as  I  am  requested  to  copy  what  he  has  written  for 
the  purpose '  crossed  out. 


CRABB  ROBINSON'S  DIARY,  ETC.    275 

portion,  at  least)  are  the  work  of  divine  inspira- 
tion. Unhappily  he  is  left  by  God  to  his  own 
illusions,  and  then  the  Atheism  is  apparent.  I 
had  the  pleasure  of  reading  to  Blake  in  my  best 
style  (and  you  know  I  am  vain  on  that  point,  and 
think  I  read  W.'s  poems  particularly  well)  the  Ode 
on  Immortality.  I  never  witnessed  greater  delight 
in  any  listener;  and  in  general  Blake  loves  the 
poems.  What  appears  to  have  disturbed  his  mind, 
on  the  other  hand,  is  the  Preface  to  the  Excursion. 
He  told  me  six  months  ago  that  it  caused  him  a 
bowel  complaint  which  nearly  killed  him.  I  have 
in  his  hand  a  copy  of  the  extract  [with  the] * 
following  note  at  the  end  :  "  Solomon,  when  he 
married  Pharaoh's  daughter  and  became  a  convert 
to  the  Heathen  Mythology,  talked  exactly  in  this 
way  of  Jehovah  as  a  very  inferior  object  of  man's 
contemplation ;  he  also  passed  him  by  unalarmed, 
and  was  permitted.  Jehovah  dropped  a  tear,  and 
followed  him  by  his  Spirit  into  the  abstract  void. 
It  is  called  the  divine  mercy.  Satan  dwells  in  it, 
but  Mercy  does  not  dwell  in  him,  he  knows  not 
to  forgive."  When  I  first  saw  Blake  at  Mrs. 
Aders's  he  very  earnestly  asked  me,  "Is  Mr.  W.  a 
sincere  real  Christian  ? "  In  reply  to  my  answer 
he  said,  "  If  so,  what  does  he  mean  by  '  the  worlds 
to  which  the  heaven  of  heavens  is  but  a  veil,'  and 
who  is  he  that  shall  '  pass  Jehovah  unalarmed '  ?  " 
It  is  since  then  that  I  have  lent  Blake  all  the 

1  The  MS.  is  here  torn. 


276  WILLIAM  BLAKE 

works  which  he  but  imperfectly  knew.  I  doubt 
whether  what  I  have  written  will  excite  your  and 
Mr.  W.'s  curiosity ;  but  there  is  something  so  de- 
lightful about  the  man — though  in  great  poverty, 
he  is  so  perfect  a  gentleman,  with  such  genuine 
dignity  and  independence,  scorning  presents,  and 
of  such  native  delicacy  in  words,  etc.  etc.  etc.,  that 
I  have  not  scrupled  promising  introducing  him 
and  Mr.  W.  together.  He  expressed  his  thanks 
strongly,  saying,  "  You  do  me  honour,  Mr.  W.  is 
a  great  man.  Besides,  he  may  convince  me  I  am 
wrong  about  him.  I  have  been  wrong  before  now," 
etc.  Coleridge  has  visited  Blake,  and,  I  am  told, 
talks  finely  about  him.  That  I  might  not  encroach 
on  a  third  sheet  I  have  compressed  what  I  had  to 
say  about  Blake.  You  must  see  him  one  of  these 
days  and  he  will  interest  you  at  all  events,  what- 
ever character  you  give  to  his  mind.' 

The  main  part  of  the  letter  is  concerned  with 
Wordsworth's  arrangement  of  his  poems,  which 
Crabb  Eobinson  says  that  he  agrees  with  Lamb  in 
disliking.  He  then  says :  '  It  is  a  sort  of  intel- 
lectual suicide  in  your  brother  not  to  have  con- 
tinued his  admirable  series  of  poems  "  dedicated  to 
liberty,"  he  might  add,  "and  public  virtue."  I 
assure  you  it  gives  me  real  pain  when  I  think  that 
some  future  commentator  may  possibly  hereafter 
write,  "This  great  poet  survived  to  the  fifth 
decennary  of  the  nineteenth  century,  but  he  appears 
to  have  dyed  in  the  year  1814  as  far  as  life  con- 


CRABB  ROBINSON'S  DIARY,  ETC.    277 

sisted  in  an  active  sympathy  with  the  temporary 
welfare  of  his  fellow-creatures.  .  .  ." 

[More  follows,  and  then]  '  I  had  no  intention, 
I  assure  you,  to  make  so  long  a  parenthesis  or 
indeed  to  advert  to  such  a  subject.  And  I  wish 
you  not  to  read  any  part  of  this  letter  which  might 
be  thought  impertinent.  ...  In  favour  of  my  affec- 
tionate attachment  to  your  brother's  fame,  do  for- 
give me  this  digression,  and,  as  I  said  above,  keep 
it  to  yourself.' 

[At  the  end  he  says]  '  My  best  remembrances  to 
Mr.  W.  And  recollect  again  that  you  are  not  to 
read  all  this  letter  to  any  one  if  it  will  offend,  and 
you  are  yourself  to  forgive  it  as  coming  from  one 
who  is  affly.  your  friend,  H.  C.  R.' 

On  April  6,  Wordsworth  answers  the  letter  from 
Rydal  Mount,  saying  :  '  My  sister  had  taken  flight 
for  Herefordshire  when  your  letter,  for  such  we 
guessed  it  to  be,  arrived — it  was  broken  open — 
(pray  forgive  the  offense)  and  your  charges  of  con- 
cealment and  reserve  frustrated.  We  are  all,  at 
all  times,  so  glad  to  hear  from  you  that  we  could 
not  resist  the  temptation  to  purchase  the  pleasure 
at  the  expense  of  the  peccadillo,  for  which  we  beg 
pardon  with  united  voices.  You  are  kind  enough 
to  mention  my  poems.' 

[All  the  rest  of  the  letter  is  taken  up  with  them, 
and  it  ends,  with  no  mention  of  Blake]  'I  can 
write  no  more.  T.  Clarkson  is  going.  Your  sup- 


278  WILLIAM   BLAKE 

posed  Biography  entertained  me  much.     I  could 
give  you  the  other  side.     Farewell.' 
[There  is  no  signature.] 


(3)— FEOM   CRABB   ROBINSON'S 
REMINISCENCES 

1810 

I  WAS  amusing  myself  this  spring  by  writing  an 
account  of  the  insane  poet,  painter,  and  engraver, 
Blake.  Perthes  of  Hamburg  had  written  to  me 
asking  me  to  send  him  an  article  for  a  new  German 
magazine,  entitled  Vaterlandische  Annalen,  which 
he  was  about  to  set  up,  and  Dr.  Median  having  in 
his  Memoirs  of  his  son  given  an  account  of  this 
extraordinary  genius  with  specimens  of  his  poems, 
I  resolved  out  of  these  to  compile  a  paper.  And 
this  I  did,1  and  the  paper  was  translated  by  Dr. 

1  The  article  appeared  under  the  title  :  '  William  Blake, 
Kiinstler,  Dichter  und  religioser  Schwarmer '  (aus  dem 
Englischen)  on  pp.  107-131  of  the  Vatcrlandisches  Museum, 
Zweiter  Band,  Erstes  Heft.  Hamburg,  bey  Friedrich  Perthes. 
1811.'  It  has  the  motto  : 

4  The  lunatic,  the  lover,  and  the  poet 
Are  of  imagination  all  compact. ' 

SHAKESPEARE. 

Five  of  Blake's  poems,  'To  the  Muse?,'   'Piping  down  the 


CRABB  ROBINSON'S  DIARY,  ETC.    279 

Julius,  who,  many  years  afterwards,  introduced 
himself  to  me  as  my  translator.  It  appears  in  the 
single  number  of  the  second  volume  of  the  Vater- 
landische  Annalen.  For  it  was  at  this  time  that 
Buonaparte  united  Hamburg  to  the  French  Empire, 
on  which  Perthes  manfully  gave  up  the  magazine, 
saying,  as  he  had  no  longer  a  Vaterland,  there 
could  be  no  Vaterlandische  Annalen.  But  before 
I  drew  up  the  paper,  I  went  to  see  a  gallery  of 
Blake's  paintings,  which  were  exhibited  by  his 
brother,  a  hosier  in  Carnaby  Market.  The  entrance 
was  2s.  6d.,  catalogue  included.  I  was  deeply 
interested  by  the  catalogue  as  well  as  the  pictures. 
I  took  4 — telling  the  brother  I  hoped  he  would 
let  me  come  in  again.  He  said,  '  Oh  !  as  often  as 
you  please.'  I  dare  say  such  a  thing  had  never 
happened  before  or  did  afterwards.  I  afterwards 
became  acquainted  with  Blake,  and  will  postpone 
till  hereafter  what  I  have  to  say  of  this  extra- 
ordinary character,  whose  life  has  since  been  written 
very  inadequately  by  Allan  Cunningham  in  his 
Lives  of  the  English  Artists. 

[At  the  side  is  written] — N.B.  What  I  have 
written  about  Blake  will  appear  at  the  end  of  the 
year  1825. 

valleys  wild,'  '  Holy  Thursday,'  '  The  Tyger,'  '  The  Garden  of 
Love,'  together  with  ten  lines  from  the  Prophetic  Books,  are 
quoted,  with  German  versions  in  the  metres  of  the  original  by 
Dr.  Julius,  the  translator  of  the  article.  On  p.  101  there  is  an 
article,  '  Von  der  neuesten  englischen  Poesie,'  containing  notices 
of  'Poems  by  W.  Cowper'  (1803),  'Works  of  R.  Burns,' and 
'  Southey's  Poems  '  (1801)  and  '  Metrical  Tales '  (1803). 


280  WILLIAM  BLAKE 

1825 
WILLIAM    BLAKE  ^^ 

IT  was  at  the  latter  end  of  the  year  1825  that 
I  put  in  writing  my  recollections  of  this  most 
remarkable  man.  The  larger  portions  are  under 
the  date  of  the  1 8th  of  December.  He  died  in  the 
year  1827.  I  have  therefore  now  revised  what  I 
wrote  on  the  10th  of  December  and  afterwards,  and 
without  any  attempt  to  reduce  to  order,  or  make 
consistent  the  wild  and  strange  rhapsodies  uttered 
by  this  insane  man  of  genius,  thinking  it  better 
to  put  down  what  I  find  as  it  occurs,  though  I  am 
aware  of  the  objection  that  may  justly  be  made  to 
the  recording  the  ravings  of  insanity  in  which  it 
may  be  said  there  can  be  found  no  principle,  as 
there  is  no  ascertainable  law  of  mental  association 
which  is  obeyed ;  and  from  which  therefore 
nothing  can  be  learned. 

This  would  be  perfectly  true  of  mere  madness — 
but  does  not  apply  to  that  form  of  insanity  ordin- 
arily called  monomania,  and  may  be  disregarded  in 
a  case  like  the  present  in  which  the  subject  of  the 
remark  was  unquestionably  what  a  German  would 
call  a  Verungluckter  Genie,  whose  theosophic  dreams 
bear  a  close  resemblance  to  those  of  Swederiborg — 
whose  genius  as  an  artist  was  praised  by  no  less 
men  than  Flaxman  and  Fuseli — and  whose  poems 
were  thought  worthy  republication  by  the  bio- 
grapher of  Swederiborg  (Wilkinson),  and  of  which 


CRABB  ROBINSON'S  DIARY,  ETC.    281 

Wordsworth  said  after  reading  a  number — they 
were  the  '  Songs  of  Innocence  and  Experience 
showing  the  two  opposite  sides  of  the  human  soul ' — 
'  There  is  no  doubt  this  poor  man  was  mad,  but 
there  is  something  in  the  madness  of  this  man 
which  interests  me  more  than  the  sanity  of  Lord 
Byron  and  Walter  Scott ! '  The  German  painter 
Gotzenberger  (a  man  indeed  who  ought  not  to  be 
named  after  the  others  as  an  authority  for  my 
writing  about  Blake)  said,  on  his  returning  to 
Germany  about  the  time  at  which  I  am  now 
arrived,  '  I  saw  in  England  many  men  of  talents, 
but  only  three  men  of  genius,  Coleridge,  Flaxman, 
and  Blake,  and  of  these  Blake  was  the  greatest.' 
I  do  not  mean  to  intimate  my  assent  to  this 
opinion,  nor  to  do  more  than  supply  such  materials 
as  my  intercourse  with  him  furnish  to  an  un- 
critical narative  to  which  I  shall  confine  myself. 
I  have  written  a  few  sentences  in  these  remini- 
scences already,  those  of  the  year  1810.  I  had 
not  then  begun  the  regular  journal  which  I  after- 
wards kept.  I  will  therefore  go  over  the  ground 
again  and  introduce  these  recollections  of  1825  by 
a  reference  to  the  slight  knowledge  I  had  of  him 
before,  and  what  occasioned  my  taking  an  interest 
in  him,  not  caring  to  repeat  what  Cunningham  has 
recorded  of  him  in  the  volume  of  his  Lives  of  the 
British  Painters,  etc.  etc.,  except  thus  much.  It 
appears  that  he  was  born 
[The  page  ends  here.] 


282  WILLIAM  BLAKE 

Dr.  Malkin,  our  Bury  Grammar  School  Head- 
master, published  in  the  year  1 806  a  Memoir  of  a 
very  precocious  child  who  died  .  .  .  years  old, 
and  he  prefixed  to  the  Memoir  an  account  of 
Blake,  and  in  the  volume  he  gave  an  account  of 
Blake  as  a  painter  and  poet,  and  printed  some 
specimens  of  his  poems,  viz.  '  The  Tyger,'  and 
ballads  and  mystical  lyrical  poems,  all  of  a  wild 
character,  and  M.  gave  an  account  of  Visions 
which  Blake  related  to  his  acquaintance.  I  knew 
that  Flaxman  thought  highly  of  him,  and  though 
he  did  not  venture  to  extol  him  as  a  genuine  seer, 
yet  he  did  not  join  in  the  ordinary  derision  of  him 
as  a  madman.  Without  having  seen  him,  yet  I 
had  already  conceived  a  high  opinion  of  him,  and 
thought  he  would  furnish  matter  for  a  paper 
interesting  to  Germans,  and  therefore  when  Fred, 
Perthes,  the  patriotic  publisher  at  Hamburg,  wrote 
to  me  in  1810  requesting  me  to  give  him  an 
article  for  his  Patriotische  Annalen,  I  thought  I 
could  do  no  better  than  send  him  a  paper  on 
Blake,  which  was  translated  into  German  by  Dr. 
Julius,  filling,  with  a  few  small  poems  copied  and 
translated,  24  pages.  These  appeared  in  the  first 
and  last  No.  of  volume  2  of  the  Annals.  The  high- 
minded  editor  boldly  declared  that  as  the  Emperor 
of  France  had  annexed  Hamburg  to  France  he  had 
no  longer  a  country,  and  there  could  no  longer  be 
any  patriotical  Annals  !  !  !  Perthes'  Life  has 
been  written  since,  which  I  have  not  seen.  I  am 


CRABB  ROBINSON'S  DIARY,  ETC.    283 

told  there  is  in  it  a  civil  mention  of  me.  This  Dr. 
Julius  introduced  himself  to  me  as  such  translator 
a  few  years  ago.  He  travelled  as  an  Inspector  of 
Prisons  for  the  Prussian  Government  into  the 
United  States  of  America.  In  order  to  enable  me 
to  write  this  paper,  which,  by  the  bye,  has  nothing 
in  it  of  the  least  value,  I  went  to  see  an  exhibition 
of  Blake's  original  paintings  in  Carnaby  Market,  at 
a  hosier's,  Blake's  brother.  These  paintings  filled 
several  rooms  of  an  ordinary  dwelling-house,  and 
for  the  sight  a  half-crown  was  demanded  of  the 
visitor,  for  which  he  had  a  catalogue.  This  cata- 
logue I  possess,  and  it  is  a  very  curious  exposure 
of  the  state  of  the  artist's  mind.  I  wished  to  send 
it  to  Germany  and  to  give  a  copy  to  Lamb  and 
others,  so  I  took  four,  and  giving  10s.,  bargained 
that  I  should  be  at  liberty  to  go  again.  '  Free  !  as 
long  as  you  live,'  *  said  the  brother,  astonished  at 
such  a  liberality,  which  he  had  never  experienced 
before,  nor  I  dare  say  did  afterwards.  Lamb  was 
delighted  with  the  catalogue,  especially  with  the 
description  of  a  painting  afterwards  engraved,  and 
connected  with  which  is  an  anecdote  that,  unex- 
plained, would  reflect  discredit  on  a  most  amiable 
and  excellent  man,  but  which  Flaxman  considered 
to  have  been  not  the  wilful  act  of  Stodart.  It  was 
after  the  friends  of  Blake  had  circulated  a  sub- 
scription paper  for  an  engraving  of  his  Canterbury 
Pilgrims,  that  Stodart  was  made  a  party  to  an 
1  '  Like '  is  first  written,  and  replaced  by  '  live.' 


284  WILLIAM   BLAKE 

engraving  of  a  painting  of  the  same  subject  by 
himself.  Stodart's  work  is  well  known,  Blake's  is 
known  by  very  few.  Lamb  preferred  it  greatly  to 
Stodart's,  and  declared  that  Blake's  description 
was  the  finest  criticism  he  had  ever  read  of 
Chaucer's  poem. 

In  this  catalogue  Blake  writes  of  himself  in  the 
most  outrageous  language — says, '  This  artist  defies 
all  competition  in  colouring ' — that  none  can  beat 
him,  for  none  can  beat  the  Holy  Ghost — that  he 
and  Eaphael  and  Michael  Angelo  were  under 
divine  influence  —  while  Corregio  and  Titian 
worshipped  a  lascivious  and  therefore  cruel  deity 
— Eeubens  a  proud  devil,  etc.  etc.  He  declared, 
speaking  of  colour,  Titian's  men  to  be  of  leather 
and  his  women  of  chalk,  and  ascribed  his  own  per- 
fection in  colouring  to  the  advantage  he  enjoyed  in 
seeing  daily  the  primitive  men  walking  in  their  native 
nakedness  in  the  mountains  of  Wales.  There  were 
about  thirty  oil-paintings,  the  colouring  excessively 
dark  and  high,  the  veins  black,  and  the  colour  of 
the  primitive  men  very  like  that  of  the  Eed 
Indians.  In  his  estimation  they  would  probably 
be  the  primitive  men.  Many  of  his  designs  were 
unconscious  imitations.  This  appears  also  in  his 
published  works — the  designs  of  Blair  s  Grave, 
which  Fuseli  and  Schiavonetti  highly  extolled — 
and  in  his  designs  to  illustrate  Job,  published  after 
his  death  for  the  benefit  of  his  widow. 


CRABB  ROBINSON'S  DIARY,  ETC.    285 

23/2/52. 

To  this  catalogue  and  in  the  printed  poems,  the 
small  pamphlet  which  appeared  in  1783,  the 
edition  put  forth  by  Wilkinson  of  'The  Songs  of 
Innocence,'  and  other  works  already  mentioned,  to 
which  I  have  to  add  the  first  four  books  of  Young's 
Night  Thoughts,  and  Allan  Cunningham's  Life  of 
him,  I  now  refer,  and  will  confine  myself  to  the 
memorandums  I  took  of  his  conversation.  I  had 
heard  of  him  from  Flaxman,  and  for  the  first  time 
dined  in  his  company  at  the  Aders'.  Linnell  the 
painter  also  was  there — an  artist  of  considerable 
talent,  and  who  professed  to  take  *  a  deep  interest 
in  Blake  and  his  work,  whether  of  a  perfectly  dis- 
interested character  may  be  doubtful,  as  will 
appear  hereafter.  This  was  on  the  10th  of 
December. 

I  was  aware  of  his  idiosyncracies  and  therefore 
to  a  great  degree  prepared  for  the  sort  of  conversa- 
tion which  took  place  at  and  after  dinner,  an  alto- 
gether unmethodical  rhapsody  on  art,  poetry,  and 
religion — he  saying  the  most  strange  things  in  the 
most  unemphatic  manner,  speaking  of  his  Visions 
as  any  man  would  of  the  most  ordinary  occurrence. 
He  was  then  68  years  of  age.  He  had  a  broad, 
pale  face,  a  large  full  eye  with  a  benignant 
expression — at  the  same  time  a  look  of  languor,2 
except  when  excited,  and  then  he  had  an  air  of 

1  '  Took  '  crossed  out. 

2  '  With  an  air  of  feebleness '  crossed  out. 


286  WILLIAM  BLAKE 

inspiration.  But  not  such  as  without  a  previous 
acquaintance  with  him,  or  attending  to  what  he 
said,  would  suggest  the  notion  that  he  was  insane. 
There  was  nothing  wild  about  his  look,  and  though 
very  ready  to  be  drawn  out  to  the  assertion  of  his 
favourite  ideas,  yet  with  no  warmth  as  if  he 
wanted  to  make  proselytes.  Indeed  one  of  the 
peculiar  features  of  his  scheme,  as  far  as  it  was  con- 
sistent, was  indifference  and  a  very  extraordinary 
degree  of  tolerance  and  satisfaction  with  what  had 
taken  place.1  A  sort  of  pious  and  humble 
optimism,  not  the  scornful  optimism  of  Candide. 
But  at  the  same  time  that  he  was  very  ready  to 
praise  he  seemed  incapable  of  envy,  as  he  was  of 
discontent.  He  warmly  praised  some  composition 
of  Mrs.  Aders,  and  having  brought  for  Aders  an  en- 
graving of  his  Canterbury  Pilgrims,  he  remarked 
that  one  of  the  figures  resembled  a  figure  in  one  of 
the  works  then  in  Aders's  room,  so  that  he  had  been 
accused  of  having  stolen  from  it.  But  he  added 
that  he  had  drawn  the  figure  in  question  20  years 
before  he  had  seen  the  original  picture.  However, 
there  is  '  no  wonder  in  the  resemblance,  as  in  my 
youth  I  was  always  studying  that  class  of  paint- 
ing.' I  have  forgotten  what  it  was,  but  his  taste 
was  in  close  conformity  with  the  old  German 
school. 

1  After  '  indifference  and '  '  the  entire  absence  of  anything 
like  blame  ['  reproach  '  crossed  out],  and  I  do  not  think  that  I 
ever  heard  him  blame  anything,  then  or  afterwards'  crossed 
out. 


CRABB  ROBINSON'S  DIARY,  ETC.    287 

This  was  somewhat  at  variance  with  what  he 
said  both  this  day  and  afterwards — implying  that 
he  copies  his  Visions.  And  it  was  on  this  first  day 
that,  in  answer  to  a  question  from  me,  he  said, '  The 
Spirits  told  me.'  This  lead  me  to  say:  Socrates 
used  pretty  much  the  same  language.  He  spoke 
of  his  Genius.  Now,  what  affinity  or  resemblance 
do  you  suppose  was  there  between  the  Genius 
which  inspired  Socrates  and  your  Spirits?  He 
smiled,  and  for  once  it  seemed  to  me  as  if  he  had 
a  feeling  of  vanity  gratified.1  '  The  same  as  in 
our  countenances.'  He  paused  and  said, '  I  was 
Socrates' — and  then  as  if  he  had  gone  too  far  in 
that — 'or  a  sort  of  brother.  I  must  have  had 
conversations  with  him.  So  I  had  with  Jesus 
Christ.  I  have  an  obscure  recollection  of  having 
been  with  both  of  them.'  As  I  had  for  many  years 
been  familiar  with  the  idea  that  an  eternity  a 
parte  post  was  inconceivable  without  an  eternity  a 
parte  ante,  I  was  naturally  led  to  express  that 
thought  on  this  occasion.  His  eye  brightened  on 
my  saying  this.  He  eagerly  assented:  'To  be 
sure.  We  are  all  coexistent  with  God ;  members 
of  the  Divine  body,  and  partakers  of  the  Divine 
nature.'  Blake's  having  adopted  this  Platonic 
idea  led  me  on  our  t&te-a-Ute  walk  home  at  night 
to  put  the  popular  question  to  him,  concerning  the 
imputed  Divinity  of  Jesus  Christ.  He  answered  : 
'  He  is  the  only  God '  —  but  then  he  added  — 

1  '  Pretty  much '  crossed  out. 


288  WILLIAM  BLAKE 

'  And  so  am  I  and  so  are  you.'  He  had  before 
said — and  that  led  me  to  put  the  question — that 
Christ  ought  not  to  have  suffered  himself  to  be 
crucified.'  '  He  should  not  have  attacked  the 
Government.  He  had  no  business  with  such 
matters.'  On  my  representing  this  to  be  inconsist- 
ent with  the  sanctity  of  divine  qualities,  he  said 
Christ  was  not  yet  become  the  Father.  It  is  hard 
on  bringing  together  these  fragmentary  recollections1 
to  fix  Blake's  position  in  relation  to  Christianity, 
Platonism,  and  Spinozism. 

It  is  one  of  the  subtle  remarks  of  Hume  on  the 
tendency  of  certain  religious  notions  to  reconcile 
us  to  whatever  occurs,  as  God's  will.  And  apply- 
this  to  something  Blake  said,  and  drawing  the  in- 
ference that  there  is  no  use  in  education,  he  hastily 
rejoined :  '  There  is  no  use  in  education.  I  hold  it 
wrong.  It  is  the  great  Sin.  It  is  eating  of  the 
tree  of  knowledge  of  Good  and  Evil.  That  was 
the  fault  of  Plato :  he  knew  of  nothing  but  the 
Virtues  and  Vices.  There  is  nothing  in  all  that. 
Everything  is  good  in  God's  eyes.'  On  my  asking 
whether  there  is  nothing  absolutely  evil  in  what 
man  does,  he  answered :  '  I  am  no  judge  of  that 
— perhaps  not  in  God's  eyes.'  Notwithstanding 
this,  he,  however,  at  the  same  time  spoke  of  error 
as  being  in  heaven ;  for  on  my  asking  whether 
Dante  was  pure  in  writing  his  Vision,  '  Pure,'  said 
Blake.  '  Is  there  any  purity  in  God's  eyes  ?  No. 

1  '  Comparing  these  fragmentary  memoranda '  crossed  out. 


CRABB  ROBINSON'S  DIARY,  ETC.    289 

"He  chargeth  his  angels  with  folly."'  He  even 
extended  this  liability  to  error  to  the  Supreme 
Being.  '  Did  he  not  repent  him  that  he  had  made 
Nineveh  ? '  My  journal  here  has  the  remark  that 
it  is  easier  to  retail  his  personal  remarks  than  to 
reconcile  those  which  seemed  to  be  in  conformity 
with  the  most  opposed  abstract  systems.  He 
spoke  with  seeming  complacency  of  his  own  life  in 
connection  with  Art.  In  becoming  an  artist  he 
'  acted  by  command.'  The  Spirits  said  to  him, 
'  Blake,  be  an  artist.'  His  eye  glistened  while  he 
spoke  of  the  joy  of  devoting  himself  to  divine  art 
alone.  '  Art  is  inspiration.  When  Mich.  Angelo 
or  Raphael,  in  their  day,  or  Mr.  Flaxman,  does  any 
of  his  fine  things,  he  does  them  in  the  Spirit.'  Of 
fame  he  said:  'I  should  be  sorry  if  I  had  any 
earthly  fame,  for  whatever  natural  glory  a  man  has 
is  so  much  detracted  from  his  spiritual  glory.  I 
wish  to  do  nothing  for  profit.  I  want  nothing — 
I  am  quite  happy/  This  was  confirmed  to  me  on 
my  subsequent  interviews  with  him.  His  dis- 
tinction between  the  Natural  and  Spiritual  worlds 
was  very  confused.  Incidentally,  Swedenborg  was 
mentioned — he  declared  him  to  be  a  Divine 
Teacher.  He  had  done,  and  would  do,  much  good. 
Yet  he  did  wrong  in  endeavouring  to  explain  to  the 
reason  what  it  could  not  comprehend.  He  seemed 
to  consider,  but  that  was  not  clear,  the  visions  of 
Swedenborg  and  Dante  as  of  the  same  kind.  Dante 
was  the  greater  poet.  He  too  was  wrong  in 

T 


290  WILLIAM  BLAKE 

occupying  his  mind  about  political  objects.  Yet 
this  did  not  appear  to  affect  his  estimation  of 
Dante's  genius,  or  his  opinion  of  the  truth  of 
Dante's  visions.  Indeed,  when  he  even  declared 
Dante  to  be  an  Atheist,  it  was  accompanied  by  ex- 
pression of  the  highest  admiration ;  though,  said 
he,  Dante  saw  Devils  where  I  saw  none.1 

I  put  down  in  my  journal  the  following  insulated 
remarks.  Jacob  Bohmen  was  placed  among  the 
divinely  inspired  men.  He  praised  also  the 
designs  to  Law's  translation  of  Bohmen.  Michael 
Angelo  could  not  have  surpassed  them. 

'Bacon,  Locke,  and  Newton  are  the  three  great 
teachers  of  Atheism,  or  Satan's  Doctrine/  he 
asserted. 

'  Irving  is  a  highly  gifted  man — he  is  a  sent  man; 

1  Crossed  out : 

'  Yet  this  did  not  appear  to]  affect  the  truth  of  his  Visions. 
I  could  not  reconcile  this  with  his  blaming  Wordsworth  for 
being  a  Platonist— not  a  Christian.  He  asked  whether  Words- 
worth acknowledged  the  Scriptures  as  Divine,  and  declared  on 
my  answering  in  the  affirmative  that  the  Introduction  to  the 
Excursion  had  troubled  him  so  as  to  bring  on  a  fit  of  illness. 
The  passage  that  offended  Blake  was 

'  Jehovah  with  his  thunder  and  the  choir 
Of  shouting  Angels  and  the  empyreal  throne, 
I  pass  them  unalarmed. 

'  "Does  Mr.  Wordsworth,"  said  Blake,  "think  his  mind  can 
surpass  Jehovah's."  I  tried  in  vain  to  rescue  Wordsworth  from 
the  imputation  of  being  a  Pagan  or  perhaps  an  Atheist,  but 
this  did  not  rob  him  of  the  character  of  being  the  great  poet. 
Indeed  Atheism  meant  but  little  in  Blake's  mind  as  will  here- 
after appear.  Therefore  when  he  declared  [Dante  to  be  an 
Atheist,  etc." 

In  the  margin :  See  of  Wordsworth  as  Blake  judged  of  him, 
p.  46  et  seq.  (i.e.  p.  296  below). 


CRABB  ROBINSON'S  DIARY,  ETC.    291 

but  they  who  are  sent  sometimes  go  further  than 
they  ought.'1 

Calvin.  I  saw  nothing  but  good  in  Calvin's 
house.  In  Luther's  there  were  Harlots.  He 
declared  his  opinion  that  the  earth  is  flat,  not 
round,  and  just  as  I  had  objected  the  circumnavi- 
gation dinner  was  announced.  But  objections 
were  seldom  of  any  use.  The  wildest  of  his 
assertions  was  made  with  the  veriest  indifference 
of  tone,2  as  if  altogether  insignificant.  It  respected 
the  natural  and  spiritual  worlds.  By  way  of 
example  of  the  difference  between  them,  he  said, 
'  You  never  saw  the  spiritual  Sun.  I  have.  I 
saw  him  on  Primrose  Hill.'  He  said,  '  Do  you  take 
me  for  the  Greek  Apollo?'  'No!'  I  said.  'That 
(pointing  to  the  sky)  that  is  the  Greek  Apollo, 
He  is  Satan.' 

Not  everything  was  thus  absurd.  There  were 
glimpses  and  flashes  of  truth  and  beauty :  as  when 
he  compared  moral  with  physical  evil.  '  Who  shall 
say  what  God  thinks  evil  ?  That  is  a  wise  tale  of 
the  Mahometans — of  the  Angel  of  the  Lord  who 
murdered  the  Infant.' — The  Hermit  of  Parnell, 
I  suppose. — 'Is  not  every  infant  that  dies  of  a 
natural  death  in  reality  slain  by  an  Angel  ? ' 

And  when  he  joined  to  the  assurance  of  his 
happiness,  that  of  his  having  suffered,  and  that  it 
was  necessary,  he  added,  'There  is  suffering  in 

1  '  Dante  saw  Devils  where  I  saw  none '  crossed  out. 

2  '  Most  unconscious  simplicity  '  crossed  out. 


292  WILLIAM  BLAKE 

Heaven  ;  for  where  there  is  the  capacity  of  enjoy- 
ment, there  is  the  capacity  of  pain.1 

I  include  among  the  glimpses  of  truth  this 
assertion,  '  I  know  what  is  true  by  internal  con- 
viction. A  doctrine  is  stated.  My  heart  tells  me 
It  must  be  true.'  I  remarked,  in  confirmation  of 
it,  that,  to  an  unlearned  man,  what  are  called  the 
external  evidences  of  religion  can  carry  no  convic- 
tion with  them  ;  and  this  he  assented  to. 

After  my  first  evening  with  him  at  Aders's,  I 
made  the  remark  in  my  journal,  that  his  observa- 
tions, apart  from  his  Visions  and  references  to  the 
spiritual  world,  were  sensible  and  acute.  In  the 
sweetness  of  his  countenance  and  gentility  of  his 
manner  he  added  an  indescribable  grace  to  his 
conversation.  I  added  my  regret,  which  I  must 
now  repeat,  at  my  inability  to  give  more  than 
incoherent  thoughts.  Not  altogether  my  fault 
perhaps. 

25/2/52. 

On  the  17th  I  called  on  him  in  his  house  in 
Fountain's  Court  in  the  Strand.  The  interview  was 
a  short  one,  and  what  I  saw  was  more  remarkable 
than  what  I  heard.  He  was  at  work  engraving  in 
a  small  bedroom,  light,  and  looking  out  on  a  mean 
yard.  Everything  in  the  room  squalid  and  in- 
dicating poverty,  except  himself.  And  there  was 

1  '  It  was  after  my  first  interview  with  him  that  I  expressed 
what  I  must  repeat  now — my  regret '  crossed  out. 


CRABB  ROBINSON'S   DIARY,  ETC.    293 

a  natural  gentility  about  him,  and  an  insensibility 
to  the  seeming  poverty,  which  quite  removed  the 
impression.  Besides,  his  linen  was  clean,  his  hand 
white,  and  his  air  quite  unembarrassed  when  he 
begged  me  to  sit  down  as  if  he  were  in  a  palace. 
There  was  but  one  chair  in  the  room  besides  that 
on  which  he  sat.  On  my  putting  my  hand  to  it, 
I  found  that  it  would  have  fallen  to  pieces  if  I  had 
lifted  it,  so,  as  if  I  had  been  a  Sybarite,  I  said  with 
a  smile,  'Will  you  let  me  indulge  myself?'  and  I 
sat  on  the  bed,  and  near  him,1  and  during  my  short 
stay  therp  was  nothing  in  him  that  betrayed  that 
he  was  {.ware  of  what  to  other  persons  might  have 
been  even  offensive,  not  in  his  person,  but  in  all 
about  him. 

His  wife  I  saw  at  this  time,  and  she  seemed  to 
be  the  very  woman  to  make  him  happy.  She  had 
been  formed  by  him.  Indeed,  otherwise,  she  could 
not  have  lived  with  him.  Notwithstanding  her 
dress,  which  was  poor  and  dirty,  she  had  a  good 
expression  in  her  countenance,  and,  with  a  dark 
eye,  had  remains1  of  beauty  in  her  youth.  She 
had  that  virtue  of  virtues  in  a  wife,  an  implicit 
reverence  of  her  husband.  It  is  quite  certain  that 
she  believed  in  all  his  visions.  And  on  one 
occasion,  not  this  day,  speaking  of  his  Visions,  she 
said,  '  You  know,  dear,  the  first  time  you  saw  God 
was  when  you  were  four  years  old,  and  he  put  his 
head  to  the  window  and  set  you  a-screaming.'  In 
1  '  He  smiled '  omitted.  2  '  Marks '  crossed  out. 


294  WILLIAM   BLAKE 

a  word,  she  was  formed  on  the  Miltonic  model,  and 
like  the  first  Wife  Eve  worshipped  God  in  her 
husband.  He  being  to  her  what  God  was  to  him. 
Vide  Milton's  Paradise  Lost — passim. 

26/2/52. 

He  was  making  designs  or  engravings,  I  forget 
which.  Carey's  Dante  was  before  [sic].  He 
showed  me  some  of  his  designs  from  Dante,  of 
which  I  do  not  presume  to  speak.  They  were  too 
much  above  me.  But  Gotzenberger,  whom  I  after- 
wards took  to  see  them,  expressed  the  highest  ad- 
miration of  them.  They  are  in  the  hands  of 
Linnell  the  painter,  and,  it  has  been  suggested,  are 
reserved  by  him  for  publication  when  Blake  may 
have  become1  an  object  of  interest  to  a  greater 
number  than  he  could  be  at  this  age.  Dante  was 
again  the  subject  of  our  conversation.  And  Blake 
declared  him  a  mere  politician  and  atheist,  busied 
about  this  world's  affairs  ;  as  Milton  was  till,  in 
his  (M.'s)  old  age,  he  returned  back  to  the  God  he 
had  abandoned  in  childhood.2  I  in  vain  en- 
deavoured to  obtain  from  him  a  qualification  of  the 
term  atheist,  so  as  not  to  include  him  in  the 
ordinary  reproach.  And  yet  he  afterwards  spoke 
of  Dante's  being  then  with  God.  I  was  more 
successful  when  he  also  called  Locke  an  atheist, 
and  imputed  to  him  wilful  deception,  and  seemed 

1  '  More '  crossed  out. 

2  '  And  yet  he  afterwards  said  that  he  was  then  with  God ' 
crossed  out. 


CRABB   ROBINSON'S  DIARY,  ETC.    295 

satisfied  with  my  admission,  that  Locke's  philosophy 
led  to  the  Atheism  of  the  French  school.  He 
reiterated  his  former  strange  notions  on  morals — 
would  allow  of  no  other  education  than  what  lies 
in  the  cultivation  of  the  fine  arts  and  the  imagina- 
tion. '  What  are  called  the  Vices  in  the  natural 
world,  are  the  highest  sublimities  in  the  spiritual 
world.'  And  when  I  supposed  the  case  of  his 
being  the  father  of  a  vicious  son  and  asked  him 
how  he  would  feel,  he  evaded  the  question  by 
saying  that  in  trying  to  think  correctly  he  must 
not  regard  his  own  weaknesses  any  more  than 
other  people's.  And  he  was  silent  to  the  observa- 
tion that  his  doctrine  denied  evil.  He  seemed  not 
unwilling  to  admit  the  Manichsean  doctrine  of  two 
principles,  as  far  as  it  is  found  in  the  idea  of  the 
Devil.  And  said  expressly  said  [sic\  he  did  not 
believe  in  the  omnipotence  of  God.  The  language 
of  the  Bible  is  only  poetical  or  allegorical  on  the 
subject,  yet  he  at  the  same  time  denied  the  reality 
of  the  natural  world.  Satan's  empire  is  the  empire 
of  nothing. 

As  he  spoke  of  frequently  seeing  Milton,  I 
ventured  to  ask,  half  ashamed  at  the  time,  which 
of  the  three  or  four  portraits  in  Holliss  Memoirs 
(vols.  in  4to)  is  the  most  like.  He  answered, '  They 
are  all  like,  at  different  ages.  I  have  seen  him  as 
a  youth  and  as  an  old  man  with  a  long  flowing 
beard.  He  came  lately  as  an  old  man — he  said 
he  came  to  ask  a  favour  of  me.  He  said  he  had 


296  WILLIAM  BLAKE 

committed  an  error  in  his  Paradise  Lost,  which  he 
wanted  me  to  correct,  in  a  poem  or  picture ;  but  I 
declined.  I  said  I  had  my  own  duties  to  perform.' 
It  is  a  presumptuous  question,  I  replied — might 
I  venture  to  ask — what  that  could  be.  '  He  wished 
me  to  expose  the  falsehood  of  his  doctrine,  taught 
in  the  Paradise  Lost,  that l  sexual  intercourse  arose 
out  of  the  Fall.  Now  that  cannot  be,  for  no  good 
can  spring  out  of  evil.'  But,  I  replied,  if  the  con- 
sequence were  evil,  mixed  with  good,  then  the 
good  might  be  ascribed  to  the  common  cause.  To 
this  he  answered  by  a  reference  to  the  androgynous 
state,  in  which  I  could  not  possibly  follow  him. 
At  the  time  that  he  asserted  his  own  possession  of 
this  gift  of  Vision,  he  did  not  boast  of  it  as 
peculiar  to  himself ;  all  men  might  have  it  if  they 
would. 

1826 

27/2/52. 

On  the  24th  I  called  a  second  time  on  him. 
And  on  this  occasion  it  was  that  I  read  to  him 
Wordsworth's  Ode  on  the  supposed  pre-existent 
State,  and  the  subject  of  Wordsworth's  religious 
character  was  discussed  when  we  met  on  the 
18th  of  Feb.,  and  the  12th  of  May.  I  will  here 
bring  together  Blake's  declarations  concerning 
Wordsworth,  and  set  down  his  marginalia  in  the 
8vo.  edit.  A.D.  1815,  vol.  i.  I  had  been  in  the 

1  '  The  plea  '  crossed  out. 


CRABB  ROBINSON'S  DIARY,  ETC.    297 

habit,  when  reading  this  marvellous  Ode  to  frieuds, 
to  omit  one  or  two  passages,  especially  that  begin- 
ning: 

'  But  there 's  a  Tree,  of  many  one,' 

lest  I  should  be  rendered  ridiculous,  being  unable 
to  explain  precisely  what  I  admired.  Not  that  I 
acknowledged  this  to  be  a  fair  test.  But  with 
Blake  I  could  fear  nothing  of  the  kind.  And  it 
was  this  very  stanza  which  threw  him  almost  into 
a  hysterical  rapture.  His  delight  in  Wordsworth's 
poetry  was  intense.1  Nor  did  it  seem  less,  not- 
withstanding the  reproaches  he  continually  cast  on 
Wordsworth  for  his  imputed  worship  of  nature ; 2 
which  in  the  mind  of  Blake  constituted  Atheism 
[p.  46]. 

28/2/52. 

The  combination  of  the  wannest  praise  with 
imputations  which  from  another  would  assume 
the  most  serious  character,  and  the  liberty  he 
took  to  interpret  as  he  pleased,  rendered  it  as 
difficult  to  be  offended  as  to  reason  with  him. 
The  eloquent  descriptions  of  Nature  in  Words- 
worth's poems  were  conclusive  proofs  of  atheism, 
for  whoever  believes  in  Nature,  said  Blake,  dis- 
believes in  God.  For  Nature  is  the  work  of  the 

1  '  And  seemingly  undisturbed  by  the  '  crossed  out. 

2  '  Which  I  have  anticipated,  and  which  he  characterised  as 
Atheism,  that  is,  in  worshipping  Nature.     See  page '  crossed 
out. 


298  WILLIAM   BLAKE 

Devil.  On  my  obtaining  from  him  the  declaration 
that  the  Bible  was  the  Word  of  God,  I  referred  to 
the  commencement  of  Genesis — In  the  beginning 
God  created  the  Heavens  and  the  Earth.  But  I 
gained  nothing  by  this,  for  I  was  triumphantly 
told  that  this  God  was  not  Jehovah,  but  the 
Elohim ;  and  the  doctrine  of  the  Gnostics  repeated 
with  sufficient  consistency  to  silence  one  so 
unlearned  as  myself. 

The  Preface  to  the  Excursion,  especially  the 
verses  quoted  from  book  i.  of  the  Eecluse,  so 
troubled  him  as  to  bring  on  a  fit  of  illness.  These 
lines  he  singled  out : 

Jehovah  with  his  thunder,  and  the  Choir 

Of  shouting  Angels,  and  the  Empyreal  throne, 

I  pass  them  unalarmed.' 

Does  Mr.  Wordsworth  think  he  can  surpass 
Jehovah  ?  There  was  a  copy  of  the  whole 
passage  in  his  own  hand,1  in  the  volume  of 
Wordsworth's  poems  sent  to  my  chambers  after  his 
death.  There  was  this  note  at  the  end  :  '  Solomon, 
when  he  married  Pharaoh's  daughter,  and  became  a 
convert  to  the  Heathen  Mythology,  talked  exactly 
in  this  way  of  Jehovah,  as  a  very  inferior  object  of 
Man's  contemplations ;  he  also  passed  him  un- 
"alarmed,  and  was  permitted.  Jehovah  dropped  a 
tear  and  followed  him  by  his  Spirit  into  the  abstract 

1  '  He  gave  me  a  copy  of  these  lines  in  his  hand,  with  this 
note  at  the  end  '  crossed  out. 


CRABB   ROBINSON'S  DIARY,  ETC.    299 

void.  It  is  called  the  Divine  Mercy.  Sarah 
dwells  in  it,  but  Mercy  does  not  dwell  in  Him.' 

Some  of  Wordsworth's  poems  he  maintained 
were  from  the  Holy  Ghost,  others  from  the  Devil. 
I  lent  him  the  8vo  edition,  two  vols.,  of  Words- 
worth's poems,  which  he  had  in  his  possession  at 
the  time  of  his  death.  They  were  sent  me  then. 
I  did  not  recognise  the  pencil  notes  he  made  in 
them  to  be  his  for  some  time,  and  was  on  the  point 
of  rubbing  them  out  under  that  impression,  when  I 
made  the  discovery. 

The  following  are  found  in  the  3rd  vol.,  in  the 
fly-leaf  under  the  words :  Poems  referring  to  the 
Period  of  Childhood. 

29/2/52. 

'  I  see  in  Wordsworth  the  Natural  man  rising  up 
against  the  Spiritual  man  continually,  and  then  he 
is  no  poet,  but  a  Heathen  Philosopher  at  Enmity 
against  all  true  poetry  or  inspiration.' 

Under  the  first  poem  : 

'  And  I  could  wish  my  days  to  be 
Bound  each  to  each  by  natural  piety,' 

he  had  written,  '  There  is  no  such  thing  as  natural 
piety,  because  the  natural  man  is  at  enmity  with 
God.'  P.  43,  under  the  Verses  'To  H.  C.,  six 
years  old ' — '  This  is  all  in  the  highest  degree 
imaginative  and  equal  to  any  poet,  but  not  superior. 
I  cannot  think  that  real  poets  have  any  competi- 


300  WILLIAM  BLAKE 

tion.  None  are  greatest  in  the  kingdom  of  heaven. 
It  is  so  in  poetry.'  P.  44, '  On  the  Influence  of 
Natural  Objects/  at  the  bottom  of  the  page. 
'  Natural  objects  always  did  and  now  do  weaken, 
deaden,  and  obliterate  imagination  in  me.  Words- 
worth must  know  that  what  he  writes  valuable  is 
not  to  be  found  in  Nature.  Eead  Michael  Angelo's 
sonnet,  vol.  iv.  p.  179.'  That  is,  the  one  beginning 

'  No  mortal  object  did  these  eyes  behold 
When  first  they  met  the  placid  light  of  thine.' l 

It  is  remarkable  that  Blake,  whose  judgements 
were  on  most  points  so  very  singular,  on  one 
subject  closely  connected  with  Wordsworth's 
poetical  reputation  should  have  taken  a  very 
commonplace  view.  Over  the  heading  of  the 
'  Essay  Supplementary  to  the  Preface  '  at  the  end 
of  the  vol.  he  wrote, '  I  do  not  know  who  wrote 
these  Prefaces ;  they  are  very  mischievous,  and 
direct  contrary  to  Wordsworth's  own  practice ' 
(p.  341).  This  is  not  the  defence  of  his  own  style 
in  opposition  to  what  is  called  Poetic  Diction,  but 
a  sort  of  historic  vindication  of  the  unpopular 
poets.  On  Macpherson,  p.  364,  Wordsworth  wrote 
with  the  severity  with  which  all  great  writers  have 
written  of  him.  Blake's  comment  below  was,  '  I 
believe  both  Macpherson  and  Chatterton,  that  what 
they  say  is  ancient  is  so.'  And  in  the  following 
page, '  I  own  myself  an  admirer  of  Ossian  equally 

1  '  An  admirable  assertion  of  the  ideal '  crossed  out. 


CRABB  ROBINSON'S  DIARY,  ETC.    301 

with  any  other  poet  whatever.  Rowley  and  Chatter- 
ton  also.'  And  at  the  end  of  this  Essay  he  wrote, 
'  It  appears  to  me  as  if  the  last  paragraph  beginning 
"Is  it  the  spirit  of  the  whole,"  etc.,  was  written 
by  another  hand  and  mind  from  the  rest  of  these 
Prefaces  ;  they  are  the  opinions  of  [  ]  land- 

scape-painter. Imagination  is  the  divine  vision 
not  of  the  world,  nor  of  man,  nor  from  man  as  he 
is  a  natural  man,  but  only  as  he  is  a  spiritual  man. 
Imagination  has  nothing  to  do  with  memory.' 

1826 

1/3/52. 

19th  Feb.  It  was  this  day  in  connection  with 
the  assertion  that1  the  Bible  is  the  Word  of  God  and 
all  truth  is  to  be  found  in  it,  he  using  language 
concerning  man's  reason  being  opposed  to  grace 
very  like  that  used  by  the  Orthodox  Christian, 
that  he  qualified,  and  as  the  same  Orthodox  would 
say  utterly  nullified  all  he  said  by  declaring  that 
he  understood  the  Bible  in  a  Spiritual  sense.  As 
to  the  natural  sense,  he  said  Voltaire  was  commis- 
sioned by  God  to  expose  that.  '  I  have  had,'  he 
said, '  much  intercourse  with  Voltaire,  and  he  said 
to  me,  "  I  blasphemed  the  Son  of  Man,  and  it  shall 
be  forgiven  me,  but  they  (the  enemies  of  Voltaire) 
blasphemed  the  Holy  Ghost  in  me,  and  it  shall  not 
be  forgiven  to  them."  '  I  ask  him  in  what  language 

1  'Some  of  Wordsworth's  '  crossed  out. 


302  WILLIAM  BLAKE 

Voltaire  spoke.  His  answer  was  ingenious  and 
gave  no  encouragement  to  cross-questioning :  '  To 
my  sensations  it  was  English.  It  was  like  the 
touch  of  a  musical  key ;  he  touched  it  probably 
French,  but  to  my  ear  it  became  English.'  I  also 
enquired  as  I  had  before  about  the  form  of  the 
persons l  who  appeared  to  him,  and  asked  why  he 
did  not  draw  them.  '  It  is  not  worth  while/  he 
said.  '  Besides  there  are  so  many  that  the  labour 
would  be  too  great.  And  there  would  be  no  use 
in  it.'  In  answer  to  an  enquiry  about  Shakespeare, 
'  he  is  exactly  like  the  old  engraving — which  is 
said  to  be  a  bad  one.  I  think  it  very  good.'  I  en- 
quired about  his  own  writings.  '  I  have  written,' 
he  answered,  '  more  than  Eousseau  or  Voltaire — 
six  or  seven  Epic  poems  as  long  as  Homer  and  20 
Tragedies  as  long  as  Macbeth.'  He  shewed  me  his 
'  Version  of  Genesis,' 2  for  so  it  may  be  called,  as 
understood  by  a  Christian  Visionary.  He  read  a 
wild  passage  in  a  sort  of  Bible  style.  '  I  shall  print 2 
no  more,'  he  said.  '  When  I  am  commanded  by  the 
Spirits,  then  I  write,  and  the  moment  I  have  written, 
I  see  the  words  fly  about  the  room  in  all  directions. 
It  is  then  published.  The  Spirits  can  read,  and 
my  MS.  is  of  no  further  use.  I  have  been 
tempted  to  burn  my  MS.,  but  my  wife  won't  let 
me.'  She  is  right,  I  answered ;  you  write  not 


1  '  Spirits '  crossed  out. 

2  '  Vision  of  Genesis  '  crossed  out. 
J  '  Write '  crossed  out. 


CRABB  ROBINSON'S  DIARY,  ETC.    303 

from  yourself  but  from  higher  order.  The  MSS. 
are  their  property,  not  yours.  You  cannot  tell 
what  purpose  they  may  answer.  This  was 
addressed  ad  hominem.  And  it  indeed  amounted 
only  to  a  deduction  from  his  own  principles.  He 
incidentally  denied  causation,  every  thing  being  the 
work  of  God  or  Devil.  Every  man  has  a  Devil  in 
himself,  and  the  conflict  between  his  Self  and  God 
is  perpetually  going  on.  I  ordered  of  him  to-day 
a  copy  of  his  songs  for  5  guineas.  My  l  manner  of 
receiving  his  mention  of  price  pleased  him.  He 
spoke  of  his  horror  of  money  and  of  turning  pale 
when  it  was  offered  him,  and  this  was  certainly 
unfeigned. 

In  the  No.  of  the  Gents.  Magazine  for  last  Jan. 
there  is  a  letter  by  Cromek  to  Blake  printed  in 
order  to  convict  Blake  of  selfishness.  It  cannot 
possibly  be  substantially  true.  I  may  elsewhere 
notice  it. 

1 3th  June.  I  saw  him  again  in  June.  He  was 
as  wild  as  ever,  says  my  journal,  but  he  was  led  to- 
day to  make  assertions  more  palpably  mischievous, 
if  capable  of  influencing  other  minds,  and  immoral, 
supposing  them  to  express  the  will 2  of  a  respon- 
sible agent,  than  anything  he  had  said  before.  As, 
for  instance,  that  he  had  learned  from  the  Bible 
that  Wives  should  be  in  common.  And  when  I 
objected  that  marriage  was  a  Divine  institution,  he 

1  '  Immediate  '  crossed  out, 

2  'Character'  crossed  out. 


304  WILLIAM  BLAKE 

referred  to  the  Bible — '  that  from  the  beginning  it 
was  not  so.'  He  affirmed  that  he  had  committed 
many  murders,  and  repeated  his  doctrine,  that 
reason  is  the  only  sin,  and  that  careless,  gay  people 
are  better  than  those  who  think,  etc.  etc. 

It  was,  I  believe,  on  the  7th  of  December  that 
I  saw  him  last.  I  had  just  heard  of  the  death  of 
Flaxman,  a  man  whom  he  professed  to  admire,  and 
was  curious  to  know  how  he  would  receive  the  in- 
telligence. It  was  as  I  expected.1  He  had  been 
ill  during  the  summer,  and  he  said  with  a  smile,  '  I 
thought  I  should  have  gone  first.'  He  then  said, 
'  I  cannot  think  of  death  as  more  than  the  going 
out  of  one  room  into  another.'  And  Flaxman  was 
no  longer  thought  of.  He  relapsed  into  his  ordi- 
nary train  of  thinking.  Indeed  I  had  by  this  time 
learned  that  there  was  nothing  to  be  gained  by 
frequent  intercourse.  And  therefore  it  was  that 
after  this  interview  I  was  not  anxious  to  be  fre- 
quent in  my  visits.  This  day  he  said,  '  Men  are 
born  with  an  Angel  and  a  Devil/  This  he  himself 
interpreted  as  Soul  and  Body,  and  as  I  have  long 
since  said  of  the  strange  sayings  of  a  man  who 
enjoys  a  high  reputation,  '  it  is  more  in  the  language 
than  the  thought  that  this  singularity  is  to  be 
looked  for.'  And  this  day  he  spoke  of  the  Old 
Testament  as  if  [sic]  were  the  evil  element.  Christ, 
he  said,  took  much  after  his  mother,  and  in  so  far 
was  one  of  the  worst  of  men.  On  my  asking  him  for 

1  '  As  might  have  been  expected '  crossed  out. 


CRABB   ROBINSON'S  DIARY,  ETC.    305 

an  instance,  he  referred  to  his  turning  the  money- 
changers out  of  the  Temple — he  had  no  right  to  do 
that.  He  digressed  into  a  condemnation  of  those 
who  sit  in  judgement  on  others.  '  I  have  never 
known  a  very  bad  man  who  had  not  something  very 
good  about  him.' 

Speaking  of  the  Atonement  in  the  ordinary 
Calvinistic  sense,  he  said, '  It  is  a  horrible  doctrine ; 
if  another  pay  your  debt,  I  do  not  forgive  it.' 

I  have  no  account  of  any  other  call — but  there 
is  probably  an  omission.  I  took  Gotzenberger  to 
see  him,  and  he  met  the  Masqueriers  in  my 
chambers.  Masquerier  was  not  the  man  to  meet 
him.  He  could  not  humour  Blake  nor  under- 
stand the  peculiar  sense  in  which  he  was  to  be 
received.1 

1827 

My  journal  of  this  year  contains  nothing  about 
Blake.  But  in  January  1828  Barron  Field  and 
myself  catted  on  Mrs.  Blake.  The  poor  old  lady 
was  more  affected  than  I  expected  she  would  be  at 
the  sight  of  me.  She  spoke  of  her  husband  as 
dying  like  an  angel.  She  informed  me  that  she 
was  going  to  live  with  Linnell  as  his  housekeeper. 
And  we  understood  that  she  would  live  with  him, 
and  he,  as  it  were,  to  farm  her  services  and  take 
all  she  had.  The  engravings  of  Job  were  his 
already.  Chaucer's  Canterbury  Pilgrims  were  hers. 

1  '  Understood '  crossed  out. 
TJ 


306  WILLIAM  BLAKE 

I  took  two  copies — one  I  gave  to  C.  Lamb.    Barron 
Field  took  a  proof. 

Mrs.  Blake  died  within  a  few  years,  and  since 
Blake's  death  Linnell  has  not  found  the  market 
I  took  for  granted  he  would  seek  for  Blake's 
works.  Wilkinson  printed  a  small  edition 
of  his  poems,  including  the  '  Songs  of  Innocence 
and  Experience,'1  a  few  years  ago,  and  Monkton 
Mylne  talks  of  printing  an  edition.  I  have  a  few 
coloured  engravings — but  Blake  is  still  an  object 
of  interest  exclusively  to  men  of  imaginative  taste 
and  psychological  curiosity.  I  doubt  much  whether 
these  mems.  will  be  of  any  use  to  this  small 
class.  I  have  been  reading  since  the  Life  of  Blake 
by  Allan  Cuningham,  vol.  ii.  p.  143  of  his  Lives  of 
the  Painters.  It  recognises  more  perhaps  of 
Blake's  merit  than  might  be  expected  of  a  Scotch 
realist. 

22/3/52. 

1  'And  some  other  poems  '  crossed  out. 


(II.)  FEOM  'A  FATHEE'S  MEMOIES  OF  HIS 
CHILD;  BY  BENJAMIN  HEATH  MALKIN 

1806 


[THIS,  the  first  printed  account  of  Blake,  is  taken  from  the 
dedicatory  epistle  of  '  A  Father's  Memoirs  of  his  Child,'  by 
Benj.  Heath  Malkin,  Esq.,  M.A.,  F.A.S.  (London:  Printed 
for  Longmans,  Hurst,  Rees,  and  Orme,  Paternoster  Row,  by 
T.  Bensley,  Bolt  Court,  Fleet  Street,  1806),  to  Thomas  Johnes, 
the  translator  of  Froissart.  I  have  given  everything  that 
relates  to  Blake,  with  enough  of  the  remainder  to  explain  the 
purpose  of  the  dedication.  Malkin  was  himself,  perhaps, 
already  engaged  on  the  translation  of  Oil  Bias,  which  he 
brought  out  in  1809.  The  frontispiece  to  the  Memoirs, 
designed  by  Blake,  and  engraved  by  Cromek,  consists  of  a 
portrait  of  little  Malkin,  from  a  miniature,  surrounded  by  a 
design  of  the  child  saying  good-bye  to  his  mother,  and  float- 
ing up  to  heaven,  hand  in  hand  with  an  ample  and  benign 
angel.] 


To  THOMAS  JOHNES,  OF  HAFOD,  ESQ.,  M.P.,  LOED 
LIEUTENANT  OF  THE  COUNTY  OF  CARDIGAN, 
ETC.  ETC.  ETC. 

MY  DEAR  FRIEND, 

I  HAVE  been  influenced  by  several  motives,  in 
prefixing  your  name  to  the  following  pages.  My 
pen  seems  destined  to  owe  its  employment,  in 
some  shape  or  other,  to  Hafod.  .  .  . 

You  may  perhaps  recollect,  that  while  I  was 
staying  with  you  last  summer,  our  conversations 
were  nearly  as  rambling  and  as  various,  as  our 
rides  over  your  new  mountain-farms,  or  as  the 
subject  matter  of  these  preliminary  remarks  seems 
likely  to  be.  ...  It  would  have  been  unnatural, 
to  have  concealed  the  mark  of  an  afflicting  dis- 
pensation, in  society  so  capable  of  consoling  the 
survivor,  and  appreciating  the  merit  of  the  de- 
parted. In  the  interchange  of  our  thoughts  on 
this  subject,  the  task  of  furnishing  the  public  with 
the  following  facts  was  urged  upon  me,  at  once  as 
a  tribute  to  the  latter,  and  a  relief  to  the  feelings 

809 


310  WILLIAM  BLAKE 

of  the  former.  .  .  .  On  mentioning  my  design  to 
some  of  my  friends,  they  expressed  their  regret, 
that  I  had  not  determined  on  it  sooner.  ...  In 
every  other  respect,  but  that  of  catching  attention 
while  the  object  is  still  before  the  eye,  the  interval 
must  be  considered  as  an  advantage.  ...  I  have 
been  asked,  '  How  could  you  get  over  such  a  loss  ? ' 
I  need  not  say,  that  this  was  not  your  question, 
for  you  could  never  have  found  it  on  the  list  of 
possible  interrogatories :  and  to  you,  for  that  very 
reason,  will  I  answer  it. 

I  got  over  this  great  loss,  by  considering  at  once 
what  I  had  left ;  how  unavailing  the  lengthened 
and  excessive  indulgence  of  grief  would  have  been 
to  myself,  and  how  useless  it  would  have  rendered 
me  to  others.  .  .  . 

Besides  this  comparison  of  my  own,  with  the 
probable  or  actual  circumstances  of  others,  I  bore 
my  disappointment  the  better  for  the  recollection, 
that  personal  regards  are  selfish.  If  my  thoughts 
were  disposed  to  dwell  on  the  mortifying  idea,  that 
society  might  have  lost  an  ornament  derived  to  it 
through  me,  they  were  soon  checked,  and  ashamed 
of  their  presumption.  Topics  of  private  bewailing 
or  condolence,  of  whatever  magnitude  they  may 
appear  to  the  individual,  can  never  be  modestly 
transferred  to  general  interest.  But  it  was  my 
principal  consolation,  that  the  change  to  him  must 
have  been  for  the  better.  Supposing  the  opinion 
to  have  been  rational  and  probable,  that  the  pro- 


A  FATHER'S  MEMOIRS  311 

mise  of  this  child  would  have  ripened  into  some- 
thing more  than  fair  capacity  and  marketable 
talent,  the  prolongation  of  life  was  to  himself 
perhaps  the  less  desirable  on  that  very  account. 
It  rarely  happens,  that  the  world  affords  even  the 
ordinary  allowance  of  happiness  to  men  of  tran- 
scendent faculties.  Their  merits  are  too  frequently 
denied  the  protection  and  encouragement,  to  which 
they  feel  themselvs  entitled,  from  the  private 
intimations  of  their  own  scrutinising  spirit. 
When  they  are  most  successful,  the  composure  of 
their  minds  does  not  always  keep  pace  with  the 
prosperity  of  their  fortunes.  They  necessarily 
have  but  few  companions ;  few,  who  are  capable 
of  appreciating  their  high  endowments,  and  enter- 
ing into  the  grandeur  of  their  conceptions.  Of 
these  few,  those  who  come  the  nearest  to  their 
own  rank  and  standard,  those  who  might  be  the 
associates  of  their  inmost  thoughts,  and  the 
partners  of  their  dearest  interests,  are  too  often 
envious  of  their  fame.  It  is  a  common  remark, 
that  great  men  are  not  gregarious.  This  is  but 
too  just ;  and  so  much  of  man's  happiness  depends 
upon  society,  that  the  comparative  solitude,  to 
which  a  commanding  genius  condemns  its  pos- 
sessor, detracts  considerably  from  the  sum  of  his 
personal  enjoyment. 

While  I  am  on  this  subject,  I  cannot  forbear 
enlarging  somewhat  on  an  instance  the  more 
apposite,  as  being  casually  connected  with  the 


312  WILLIAM  BLAKE 

subsequent  pages.  Hitherto,  it  has  confirmed  the 
observation  just  hazarded,  on  the  probable  fate  of 
stubborn  originality  in  human  life.  There  seems 
now  indeed  some  prospect,  that  the  current  will 
turn :  and  I  shall  be  eager,  on  the  evidence  of  the 
very  first  deponent,  to  disencumber  myself  of  an 
opinion,  which  pays  so  ill  a  compliment  to  our 
nature.  In  the  meantime,  I  am  confident  that 
you,  and  my  other  readers  of  taste  and  feeling,  will 
readily  forgive  my  travelling  a  little  out  of  the 
record,  for  the  purpose  of  descanting  on  merit, 
which  ought  to  be  more  conspicuous,  and  which 
must  have  become  so  long  since,  but  for  opinions 
and  habits  of  an  eccentric  kind. 

It  is,  I  hope,  unnecessary  to  call  your  attention 
to  the  ornamental  device,  round  the  portrait  in 
this  book ;  but  I  cannot  so  easily  refrain  from 
introducing  to  you  the  designer. 

Mr.  William  Blake,  very  early  in  life,  had  the 
ordinary  opportunities  of  seeing  pictures  in  the 
houses  of  noblemen  and  gentlemen,  and  in  the 
king's  palaces.  He  soon  improved  such  casual 
occasions  of  study,  by  attending  sales  at  Langford's, 
Christie's,  and  other  auction-rooms.  At  ten  years 
of  age  he  was  put  to  Mr.  Pars's  drawing-school  in 
the  Strand,  where  he  soon  attained  the  art  of 
drawing  from  casts  in  plaster  of  the  various 
antiques.  His  father  bought  for  him  the  G-ladiator, 
the  Hercules,  the  Venus  of  Medicis,  and  various 
heads,  hands  and  feet.  The  same  indulgent 


A  FATHER'S  MEMOIRS  313 

parent  soon  supplied  him  with  money  to  buy 
prints ;  when  he  immediately  began  his  collection, 
frequenting  the  shops  of  the  print-dealers,  and  the 
sales  of  the  auctioneers.  Langford  called  him  his 
little  connoisseur ;  and  often  knocked  down  to 
him  a  cheap  lot,  with  friendly  precipitation.  He 
copied  Raphael  and  Michael  Angelo,  Martin 
Hemskerck  and  Albert  Durer,  Julio  Romano,  and 
the  rest  of  the  historic  class,  neglecting  to  buy  any 
other  prints,  however  celebrated.  His  choice  was 
for  the  most  part  contemned  by  his  youthful 
companions,  who  were  accustomed  to  laugh  at 
what  they  called  his  mechanical  taste.  At  the 
age  of  fourteen,  he  fixed  on  the  engraver  of  Stuart's 
Athens  and  West's  Pylades  and  Orestes  for  his 
master,  to  whom  he  served  seven  years'  apprentice- 
ship. Basire,  whose  taste  was  like  his  own, 
approved  of  what  he  did.  Two  years  passed  over 
smoothly  enough,  till  two  other  apprentices  were 
added  to  the  establishment,  who  completely 
destroyed  its  harmony.  Blake,  not  choosing  to 
take  part  with  his  master  against  his  fellow  ap- 
prentices, was  sent  out  to  make  drawings.  This 
circumstance  he  always  mentions  with  gratitude  to 
Basire,  who  said  that  he  was  too  simple  and  they 
too  cunning. 

He  was  employed  in  making  drawings  from 
old  buildings  and  monuments,  and  occasionally, 
especially  in  winter,  in  engraving  from  those 
drawings.  This  occupation  led  him  to  an  ac- 


314  WILLIAM  BLAKE 

quaintance  with  those  neglected  works  of  art, 
called  Gothic  monuments.  There  he  found  a 
treasure,  which  he  knew  how  to  value.  He  saw 
the  simple  and  plain  road  to  the  style  of  art  at 
which  he  aimed,  unentangled  in  the  intricate 
windings  of  modern  practice.  The  monuments  of 
Kings  and  Queens  in  Westminster  Abbey,  which 
surround  the  chapel  of  Edward  the  Confessor, 
particularly  that  of  King  Henry  the  Third,  the 
beautiful  monument  and  figure  of  Queen  Elinor, 
Queen  Philippa,  King  Edward  the  Third,  King 
Richard  the  Second  and  his  Queen,  were  among 
his  first  studies.  All  these  he  drew  in  every  point 
he  could  catch,  frequently  standing  on  the  monu- 
ment, and  viewing  the  figures  from  the  top.  The 
heads  he  considered  as  portraits;  and  all  the 
ornaments  appeared  as  miracles  of  art,  to  his 
Gothicised  imagination.  He  then  drew  Ayiner  de 
Valence's  monument,  with  his  fine  figure  on  the 
top.  Those  exquisite  little  figures  which  surround 
it,  though  dreadfully  mutilated,  are  still  models  for 
the  study  of  drapery.  But  I  do  not  mean  to 
enumerate  all  his  drawings,  since  they  would  lead 
me  over  all  the  old  monuments  in  Westminster 
Abbey,  as  well  as  over  other  churches  in  and  about 
London. 

Such  was  his  employment  at  Basire's.  As  soon 
as  he  was  out  of  his  time,  he  began  to  engrave  two 
designs  from  the  History  of  England,  after  drawings 
which  he  had  made  in  the  holiday  hours  of  his 


A  FATHER'S   MEMOIRS  315 

apprenticeship.  They  were  selected  from  a  great 
number  of  historical  compositions,  the  fruits  of  his 
fancy.  He  continued  making  designs  for  his  own 
amusement,  whenever  he  could  steal  a  moment 
from  the  routine  of  business ;  and  began  a  course 
of  study  at  the  Royal  Academy,  under  the  eye  of 
Mr.  Moser.  Here  he  drew  with  great  care,  perhaps 
all,  or  certainly  nearly  all  the  noble  antique  figures 
in  various  views.  But  now  his  peculiar  notions 
began  to  intercept  him  in  his  career.  He  professes 
drawing  from  life  always  to  have  been  hateful  to 
him  ;  and  speaks  of  it  as  looking  more  like  death, 
or  smelling  of  mortality.  Yet  still  he  drew  a  good 
deal  from  life,  both  at  the  academy  and  at  home. 
In  this  manner  has  he  managed  his  talents,  till 
he  is  himself  almost  become  a  Gothic  monument. 
On  a  view  of  his  whole  life,  he  still  thinks  himself 
authorised  to  pronounce,  that  practice  and  oppor- 
tunity very  soon  teach  the  language  of  art :  but 
its  spirit  and  poetry,  which  are  seated  in  the 
imagination  alone,  never  can  be  taught ;  and  these 
make  an  artist. 

Mr.  Blake  has  long  been  known  to  the  order 
of  men  among  whom  he  ranks ;  and  is  highly 
esteemed  by  those,  who  can  distinguish  excellence 
under  the  disguise  of  singularity.  Enthusiastic 
and  high-flown  notions  on  the  subject  of  religion 
have  hitherto,  as  they  usually  do,  prevented  his 
general  reception,  as  a  son  of  taste  and  of  the  muses. 
The  sceptic  and  the  rational  believer,  uniting  their 


316  WILLIAM  BLAKE 

forces  against  the  visionary,  pursue  and  scare  a 
warm  and  brilliant  imagination,  with  the  hue  and 
cry  of  madness.  Not  contented  with  bringing 
down  the  reasonings  of  the  mystical  philosopher, 
as  they  well  may,  to  this  degraded  level,  they 
apply  the  test  of  cold  calculation  and  mathematical 
proof  to  departments  of  the  mind,  which  are 
privileged  to  appeal  from  so  narrow  and  rigorous 
a  tribunal.  They  criticise  the  representations  of 
corporeal  beauty,  and  the  allegoric  emblems  of 
mental  perfections ;  the  image  of  the  visible  world, 
which  appeals  to  the  senses  for  a  testimony  to  its 
truth,  or  the  type  of  futurity  and  the  immortal 
soul,  which  identifies  itself  with  our  hopes  and 
with  our  hearts,  as  if  they  were  syllogisms  or 
theorems,  demonstrable  propositions  or  consecutive 
corollaries.  By  them  have  the  higher  powers  of 
this  artist  been  kept  from  public  notice,  and  his 
genius  tied  down,  as  far  as  possible,  to  the 
mechanical  department  of  his  profession.  By 
them,  in  short,  has  he  been  stigmatised  as  an 
engraver,  who  might  do  tolerably  well,  if  he  was 
not  mad.  But  meD,  whose  names  will  bear  them 
out,  in  what  they  affirm,  have  now  taken  up  his 
cause.  On  occasion  of  Mr.  Blake  engaging  to 
illustrate  the  poem  of  The  Grave,  some  of  the  first 
artists  in  this  country  have  stept  forward,  and 
liberally  given  the  sanction  of  ardent  and  enco- 
miastic applause.  Mr.  Fuseli,  with  a  mind  far 
superior  to  that  jealousy  above  described,  has 


A  FATHER'S   MEMOIRS  317 

written  some  introductory  remarks  in  the  Pro- 
spectus of  the  work.  To  these  he  has  lent  all  the 
penetration  of  his  understanding,  with  all  the 
energy  and  descriptive  power  characteristic  of  his 
style.  Mr.  Hope  and  Mr.  Locke  have  pledged 
their  character  as  connoisseurs,  by  approving  and 
patronising  these  designs.  Had  I  been  furnished 
with  an  opportunity  of  showing  them  to  you,  I 
should,  on  Mr.  Blake's  behalf,  have  requested 
your  concurring  testimony,  which  you  would  not 
have  refused  me,  had  you  viewed  them  in  the 
same  light. 

Neither  is  the  capacity  of  this  untutored  pro- 
ficient limited  to  his  professional  occupation.  He 
has  made  several  irregular  and  unfinished  attempts 
at  poetry.  He  has  dared  to  venture  on  the  ancient 
simplicity ;  and  feeling  it  in  his  own  character 
and  manners,  has  succeeded  better  than  those, 
who  have  only  seen  it  through  a  glass.  His 
genius  in  this  line  assimilates  more  with  the  bold 
and  careless  freedom,  peculiar  to  our  writers  at  the 
latter  end  of  the  sixteenth,  and  former  part  of 
the  seventeenth  century,  than  with  the  polished 
phraseology,  and  just,  but  subdued  thought  of  the 
eighteenth.  As  the  public  have  hitherto  had  no 
opportunity  of  passing  sentence  on  his  poetical 
powers,  I  shall  trespass  on  your  patience,  while  I 
introduce  a  few  specimens  from  a  collection,  cir- 
culated only  among  the  author's  friends,  and  richly 
embellished  by  his  pencil. 


318  WILLIAM   BLAKE 

LAUGHING  SONG 

When  the  green  woods  laugh  with  the  voice  of  joy, 
And  the  dimpling  stream  runs  laughing  by, 
When  the  air  does  laugh  with  our  merry  wit, 
And  the  green  hill  laughs  with  the  noise  of  it, 

When  the  meadows  laugh  with  lively  green, 
And  the  grasshopper  laughs  in  this  merry  scene, 
When  Mary  and  Susan  and  Emily, 
With  their  sweet  round  mouths,  sing  Ha,  ha,  he  ! 

When  the  painted  birds  laugh  in  the  shade, 
Where  our  table  with  cherries  and  nuts  is  spread, 
Come  live  and  be  merry  and  join  with  me, 
To  sing  the  sweet  chorus  of  Ha,  ha,  he  ! 

The  Fairy  Glee  of  Oberon,  which  Stevens'a 
exquisite  music  has  familiarised  to  modern  ears, 
will  immediately  occur  to  the  reader  of  these 
laughing  stanzas.  We  may  also  trace  another  less 
obvious  resemblance  to  Jonson,  in  an  ode  gratu- 
latory  to  the  Eight  Honourable  Hierome,  Lord 
Weston,  for  his  return  from  his  embassy,  in  the 
year  1632.  The  accord  is  to  be  found,  not  in  the 
words  nor  in  the  subject ;  for  either  would  betray 
imitation :  but  in  the  style  of  thought,  and,  if  I 
may  so  term  it,  the  date  of  the  expression. 

Such  pleasure  as  the  teeming  earth 

Doth  take  in  easy  nature's  birth, 
When  she  puts  forth  the  life  of  every  thing : 

And  in  a  dew  of  sweetest  rain, 

She  lies  delivered  without  pain, 
Of  the  prime  beauty  of  the  year,  the  spring. 


A  FATHER'S  MEMOIRS  319 

The  rivers  in  their  shores  do  run, 
The  clouds  rack  clear  before  the  sun, 

The  rudest  winds  obey  the  calmest  air  : 
Rare  plants  from  every  bank  do  rise, 
And  every  plant  the  sense  surprise, 

Because  the  order  of  the  whole  is  fair  ! 

The  very  verdure  of  her  nest, 

Wherein  she  sits  so  richly  drest, 
As  all  the  wealth  of  season  there  was  spread ; 

Doth  show  the  graces  and  the  hours 

Have  multiplied  their  arts  and  powers, 
In  making  soft  her  aromatic  bed. 

Such  joys,  such  sweets,  doth  your  return 

Bring  all  your  friends,  fair  lord,  that  burn 
With  love,  to  hear  your  modesty  relate 

The  bus'ness  of  your  blooming  wit, 

With  all  the  fruit  shall  follow  it, 
Both  to  the  honour  of  the  king  and  state. 

The  following  poem  of  Blake  is  in  a  different 
character.  It  expresses  with  majesty  and  pathos 
the  feelings  of  a  benevolent  mind,  on  being  present 
at  a  sublime  display  of  national  munificence  and 
charity. 

HOLY  THURSDAY 

'Twas  on  a  Holy  Thursday,  their  innocent  faces  clean, 
The  children  walking  two  and  two,  in  red  and  blue  and 

green ; 
Grey-headed  beadles  walked  before,  with  wands  as  white 

as  snow ; 
Till  into  the  high  dome  of    Paul's,  they,  like  Thames' 

waters,  flow. 


320  WILLIAM  BLAKE 

Oh  !  What  a  multitude  they  seemed,   these  flowers  of 

London  town  ! 

Seated  in  companies  they  sit,  with  radiance  all  their  own  ! 
The  hum  of  multitudes  was  there,  but  multitudes  of  lambs  ; 
Thousands  of  little  boys  and  girls,  raising  their  innocent 

hands. 

Now  like  a  mighty  wind  they  raise  to  heaven  the  voice 

of  song, 
Or  like  harmonious  thunderings,   the  seats   of   heaven 

among ! 
Beneath  them  sit  the  aged  men,  wise  guardians  of  the 

poor: 
Then  cherish  pity,  lest  you  drive  an  angel  from  your  door. 

The  book  of  Revelation,  which  may  well  be 
supposed  to  engross  much  of  Mr.  Blake's  study, 
seems  to  have  directed  him,  in  common  with 
Milton,  to  some  of  the  foregoing  images.  '  And  I 
heard  as  it  were  the  voice  of  a  great  multitude,  and 
as  the  voice  of  many  waters,  and  as  the  voice  of 
mighty  thunderings,  saying,  Alleluia :  for  the  Lord 
God  omnipotent  reigneth.'  Milton  comprises  the 
mighty  thunderings  in  the  epithet  '  loud,'  and 
adopts  the  comparison  of  many  waters,  which 
image  our  poet,  having  in  the  first  stanza  appro- 
priated differently,  to  their  flow  rather  than  to 
their  sound,  exchanges  in  the  last  for  that  of  a 
mighty  wind. 

He  ended ;  and  the  heav'nly  audience  loud 
Sung  hallelujah,  as  the  sound  of  sees, 
Through  multitude  that  sung. 

Paradise  Lost,  Book  x.  641. 


321 

It  may  be  worth  a  moment's  consideration, 
whether  Dr.  Johnson's  remarks  on  devotional 
poetry,  though  strictly  just  where  he  applies  them, 
to  the  artificial  compositions  of  Waller  and  Watts, 
are  universally  and  necessarily  true.  Watts  seldom 
rose  above  the  level  of  a  mere  versifier.  Waller, 
though  entitled  to  the  higher  appellation  of  poet, 
had  formed  himself  rather  to  elegance  and  delicacy, 
than  to  passionate  emotions  or  a  lofty  and  dignified 
deportment.  The  devotional  pieces  of  the  Hebrew 
bards  are  clothed  in  that  simple  language,  to  which 
Johnson  with  justice  ascribes  the  character  of 
sublimity.  There  is  no  reason  therefore  why  the 
poets  of  other  nations  should  not  be  equally  suc- 
cessful, if  they  think  with  the  same  purity,  and 
express  themselves  in  the  same  unaffected  terms. 
He  says  indeed  with  truth,  that  '  Repentance 
trembling  in  the  presence  of  the  judge,  is  not  at 
leisure  for  cadences  and  epithets.'  But  though 
we  should  exclude  the  severer  topics  from  our 
catalogue,  mercy  and  benevolence  may  be  treated 
poetically,  because  they  are  in  unison  with  the 
mild  spirit  of  poetry.  They  are  seldom  treated 
successfully ;  but  the  fault  is  not  in  the  subject. 
The  mind  of  the  poet  is  too  often  at  leisure  for 
the  mechanical  prettinesses  of  cadence  and  epithet, 
when  it  ought  to  be  engrossed  by  higher  thoughts. 
Words  and  numbers  present  themselves  unbidden, 
when  the  soul  is  inspired  by  sentiment,  elevated 
by  enthusiasm,  or  ravished  by  devotion.  I  leave  it 

x 


322  WILLIAM  BLAKE 

to  the  reader  to  determine,  whether  the  following 
stanzas  have  any  tendency  to  vindicate  this 
species  of  poetry ;  and  whether  their  simplicity 
and  sentiment  at  all  make  amends  for  their  in- 
artificial and  unassuming  construction. 

THE  DIVINE  IMAGE 

To  Mercy,  Pity,  Peace,  and  Love, 
All  pray  in  their  distress, 
And  to  these  virtues  of  delight 
Return  their  thankfulness. 

For  Mercy,  Pity,  Peace,  and  Love 
Is  God  our  Father  dear  : 
And  Mercy,  Pity,  Peace,  and  Love, 
Is  man,  his  child  and  care. 

For  Mercy  has  a  human  heart ; 
Pity,  a  human  face ; 
And  Love,  the  human  form  divine, 
And  Peace,  the  human  dress. 

Then  every  man,  of  every  clime, 
That  prays  in  his  distress, 
Prays  to  the  human  form  divine, 
Love,  Mercy,  Pity,  Peace. 

And  all  must  love  the  human  form, 
In  Heathen,  Turk,  or  Jew  ! 
Where  Mercy,  Love,  and  Pity  dwell, 
There  God  is  dwelling  too. 

Shakespeare's  Venus  and  Adonis,  Tarquin  and 
Lucrece,  and  his  Sonnets,  occasioned  it  to  be  said  by 
a  contemporary,  that,  'As  the  soul  of  Euphorbus  was 


A  FATHER'S  MEMOIRS  323 

thought  to  live  in  Pythagoras,  so  the  sweet  witty 
soul  of  Ovid  lives  in  mellifluous  honey-tongued 
Shakespeare/  These  poems,  now  little  read,  were 
favourite  studies  of  Mr.  Blake's  early  days.  So 
were  Jonson's  Underwoods  and  Miscellanies,  and 
he  seems  to  me  to  have  caught  his  manner,  more 
than  that  of  Shakespeare  in  his  trifles.  The  fol- 
lowing song  is  a  good  deal  in  the  spirit  of  the 
Hue  and  Cry  after  Cupid,  in  the  Masque  on  Lord 
Haddington's  marriage.  It  was  written  before  the 
age  of  fourteen,  in  the  heat  of  youthful  fancy, 
unchastised  by  judgment.  The  poet,  as  such, 
takes  the  very  strong  liberty  of  equipping  himself 
with  wings,  and  thus  appropriates  his  metaphorical 
costume  to  his  corporeal  fashion  and  seeming. 
The  conceit  is  not  unclassical;  but  Pindar  and 
the  ancient  lyrics  arrogated  to  themselves  the 
bodies  of  swans  for  their  august  residence.  Our 
Gothic  songster  is  content  to  be  encaged  by  Cupid; 
and  submits,  like  a  young  lady's  favourite,  to  all 
the  vagaries  of  giddy  curiosity  and  tormenting 
fondness. 

How  sweet  I  roamed  from  field  to  field, 
And  tasted  all  the  summer's  pride, 

Till  I  the  prince  of  love  beheld, 

Who  in  the  sunny  beams  did  glide  ! 

He  showed  me  lilies  for  my  hair, 

And  blushing  roses  for  my  brow ; 

He  led  me  through  his  gardens  fair, 

Where  all  his  golden  pleasures  grow. 


324  WILLIAM  BLAKE 

With  sweet  May  dews  my  wings  were  wet, 
And  Phoebus  fired  my  vocal  rage ; 

He  caught  me  in  his  silken  net, 

And  shut  me  in  his  golden  cage. 

He  loves  to  sit  and  hear  me  sing, 

Then,  laughing,  sports  and  plays  with  me ; 
Then  stretches  out  my  golden  wing, 

And  mocks  my  loss  of  liberty. 

The  playful  character  ascribed  to  the  prince  of 
love,  especially  his  wanton  and  fantastic  action 
while  sporting  with  his  captive,  in  the  two  last 
stanzas,  render  it  probable  that  the  author  had 
read  the  Hue  and  Cry  after  Cupid.  If  so,  it  had 
made  its  impression ;  but  the  lines  could  scarcely 
have  been  remembered  at  the  time  of  writing,  or 
the  resemblance  would  have  been  closer.  The 
stanzas  to  which  I  especially  allude,  are  these. 

Wings  he  hath,  which  though  ye  clip, 
He  will  leap  from  lip  to  lip, 
Over  liver,  lights,  and  heart, 
But  not  stay  in  any  part ; 
And,  if  chance  his  arrow  misses, 
He  will  shoot  himself,  in  kisses. 

Idle  minutes  are  his  reign  ; 

Then  the  straggler  makes  his  gain, 
By  presenting  maids  with  toys, 
And  would  have  ye  think  'em  joys  : 
'Tis  th'  ambition  of  the  elf, 
To  have  all  childish  as  himself. 

The  two   following  little  pieces  are   added,  as 


A  FATHER'S  MEMOIRS  325 

well  by  way  of  contrast,  as  for  the  sake  of  their 
respective  merits.  In  the  first,  there  is  a  simple 
and  pastoral  gaiety,  which  the  poets  of  a  refined 
age  have  generally  found  much  more  difficult  of 
attainment,  than  the  glitter  of  wit,  or  the  affecta- 
tion of  antithesis.  The  second  rises  with  the  sub- 
ject. It  wears  that  garb  of  grandeur,  which  the 
idea  of  creation  communicates  to  a  mind  of  the 
higher  order.  Our  bard,  having  brought  the  topic 
he  descants  on  from  warmer  latitudes  than  his 
own,  is  justified  in  adopting  an  imagery,  of  almost 
oriental  feature  and  complexion. 

SONG 

I  love  the  jocund  dance, 
The  softly  breathing  song, 
Where  innocent  eyes  do  glance, 

And  where  lisps  the  maiden's  tongue. 

I  love  the  laughing  gale, 
I  love  the  echoing  hill, 
Where  mirth  does  never  fail, 

And  the  jolly  swain  laughs  his  fill 

I  love  the  pleasant  cot, 
I  love  the  innocent  bower, 
Where  white  and  brown  is  our  lot, 
Or  fruit  in  the  midday  hour. 

I  love  the  oaken  seat, 
Beneath  the  oaken  tree, 
Where  all  the  old  villagers  meet, 
And  laugh  our  sports  to  see. 


326  WILLIAM  BLAKE 

I  love  our  neighbours  all, 
But,  Kitty,  I  better  love  thee ; 
And  love  them  I  ever  shall ; 
But  thou  art  all  to  me. 


THE  TIGER 

Tiger,  Tiger,  burning  bright, 
In  the  forest  of  the  night ! 
What  immortal  hand  or  eye 
Could  frame  thy  fearful  symmetry  ? 

In  what  distant  deeps  or  skies, 
Burnt  the  fire  of  thine  eyes  ? 
On  what  wings  dare  he  aspire  ? 
What  the  hand  dare  seize  the  fire  ? 

And  what  shoulder,  and  what  art, 
Could  twist  the  sinews  of  thy  heart  1 
When  thy  heart  began  to  beat, 
What  dread  hand  forged  thy  dread  feet  ? 

What  the  hammer  1  What  the  chain  1 
In  what  furnace  was  thy  brain  ? 
What  the  anvil  ?  What  dread  grasp 
Dared  its  deadly  terrors  clasp  ? 

When  the  stars  threw  down  their  spears, 
And  watered  heaven  with  their  tears, 
Did  he  smile  his  work  to  see  *? 
Did  he,  who  made  the  lamb,  make  thee  ? 

Tiger,  tiger,  burning  bright, 
In  the  forest  of  the  night ; 
What  immortal  hand  or  eye 
Dare  frame  thy  fearful  symmetry  ? 


A  FATHER'S   MEMOIRS  327 

Besides  these  lyric  compositions,  Mr.  Blake  has 
given  several  specimens  of  blank  verse.  Here,  as 
might  be  expected,  his  personifications  are  bold, 
his  thoughts  original,  and  his  style  of  writing 
altogether  epic  in  its  structure.  The  unrestrained 
measure,  however,  which  should  warn  the  poet  to 
restrain  himself,  has  not  unfrequently  betrayed 
Mm  into  so  wild  a  pursuit  of  fancy,  as  to  leave 
harmony  unregarded,  and  to  pass  the  line  pre- 
scribed by  criticism  to  the  career  of  imagination. 

But  I  have  been  leading  you  beside  our  subject, 
into  a  labyrinth  of  poetical  comment,  with  as  little 
method  or  ceremony,  as  if  we  were  to  have  no 
witness  of  our  correspondence.  It  is  time  we 
should  return  from  the  masquing  regions  of  poetry, 
to  the  business  with  which  we  set  out.  Donne, 
in  his  Anatomy  of  the  World,  remarks  the 
Egyptians  to  have  acted  wisely,  in  bestowing  more 
cost  upon  their  tombs  than  on  their  houses.  This 
example  he  adduces,  to  justify  his  own  Funeral 
Elegies :  and  I  may  perhaps  be  allowed  to  adopt 
it,  as  an  additional  plea,  should  my  former  be  of 
no  avail,  for  coming  forward  with  this  piece  of 
almost  infantine  biography.  .  .  . 

I  regret,  my  dear  friend,  that  it  was  not  in 
my  power  to  furnish  you  and  my  readers  with  a 
portrait  of  a  later  date.  We  had  often  talked  of 
allowing  ourselves  that  indulgence ;  but  we  were 
not  privy  to  the  event,  which  was  to  have 
communicated  to  it  an  incalculable  value.  The 


328  WILLIAM  BLAKE 

engraving  here  given,  though  it  might  well  be 
taken  to  represent  a  much  older  child,  is  from  a 
very  beautiful  miniature,  painted  by  Paye,  when 
Thomas  was  not  quite  two  years  old.  He  theii 
was  only  beginning  to  speak ;  but  there  was  even 
at  that  early  period  an  intelligence  in  his  eye,  and 
an  expression  about  his  mouth,  which  are,  I  hope, 
sufficiently  characterised  in  the  delineation  to  afford 
no  inadequate  idea  of  his  physiognomy.  .  .  . 

At  all  events,  this  work,  though  it  should  escape 
censure,  can  rank  no  higher  than  a  trifle.  What 
apology  must  I  make  for  addressing  it  to  a  fellow- 
labourer,  who  has  accomplished  the  serious  and 
difficult  task  of  giving  an  English  dress  to  Frois- 
sart  ?  I  think  it  was  Gray  who  denominated  your 
venerable  original  the  Herodotus  of  a  barbarous 
age.  But  surely  that  age  is  entitled  to  a  more 
respectful  epithet,  when  France  could  boast  its 
Froissart,  Italy  its  Petrarch,  England  its  Wickliffe, 
the  father  of  our  reformation,  and  Chaucer,  the 
father  of  our  poetry.  If  I  might  slightly  alter 
the  designation  of  so  complete  a  critic,  I  would 
prefer  calling  this  simple  and  genuine  historian, 
the  Herodotus  of  chivalry.  But  by  whatever  title 
we  are  to  greet  him,  the  interesting  minuteness  of 
his  recital,  affording  a  strong  pledge  of  its  fidelity, 
the  lively  delineation  of  manners,  and  the  charm 
of  unadulterated  language,  all  conspire  to  place 
him  in  the  first  rank  of  early  writers.  The  public 
began  to  revolt  from  that  spirit  of  philosophising 


A  FATHER'S   MEMOIRS  329 

on  the  most  common  occasions,  in  consequence  of 
which  our  modern  historians  seem  to  be  more 
ingenious  in  assigning  causes  and  motives,  than 
assiduous  to  ascertain  facts.  We  are  returning 
home  to  plain  tales  and  first-hand  authorities ;  and 
you  will  share  the  honour  of  pointing  out  the  way. 
Froissart,  hitherto  inaccessible  to  English  readers 
in  general,  from  the  obsolete  garb  both  of  the 
French  and  of  Lord  Berners's  translation,  may  now 
be  read  in  such  a  form,  as  to  unite  a  peculiar 
thought  and  turn  of  the  ancient  with  the  intel- 
ligible phraseology  of  modern  times.  With  my  best 
congratulations  on  your  success,  and  my  earnest 
request  to  be  forgiven  for  thus  intruding  on  your 
leisure,  believe  me  to  be,  my  dear  friend,  faithfully 
yours,  B.  H.  MALKIN. 

HACKNBY,  January  4,  1806. 


(III.)  FKOM  LADY  CHAELOTTE  BUKY'S 
DIARY 

1820 


[Tnis  extract  from  the  Diary  illustrative  of  the  Times  of 
George  the  Fourth,  by  Lady  Charlotte  Bury,  afterwards  Lady 
Charlotte  Campbell,  published  anonymously,  and  edited  by 
John  Gait,  in  four  volumes,  in  1839,  was  first  noticed  by  Mr. 
W.  M.  Rossetti,  who  printed  it  in  the  Athenaeum.  It  is  from 
vol.  iii.  pp.  345-348.] 


FKOM  LADY  CHARLOTTE  BURY'S  DIARY 

1820 

Tuesday,  the  20th  of  January  [1820]. — I  dined 

at  Lady  C.  L 's.  She  had  collected  a  strange 

party  of  artists  and  literati  and  one  or  two  fine 
folks,  who  were  very  ill  assorted  with  the  rest  of 
the  company,  and  appeared  neither  to  give  nor 
receive  pleasure  from  the  society  among  whom 
they  were  mingled.  Sir  T.  Lawrence,  next  whom 
I  sat  at  dinner,  is  as  courtly  as  ever.  His  conver- 
sation is  agreeable,  but  I  never  feel  as  if  he  was 
saying  what  he  really  thought.  .  .  . 

Besides  Sir  T.,  there  was  also  present  of  this 
profession  Mrs.  M.,  the  miniature  painter,  a 
modest,  pleasing  person;  like  the  pictures  she 
executes,  soft  and  sweet.  Then  there  was  another 
eccentric  little  artist,  by  name  Blake ;  not  a  regular 
professional  painter,  but  one  of  those  persons 
who  follow  the  art  for  its  own  sweet  sake,  and 
derive  their  happiness  from  its  pursuit.  He 
appeared  to  me  to  be  full  of  beautiful  imaginations 
and  genius ;  but  how  far  the  execution  of  his 

333 


334  WILLIAM  BLAKE 

designs  is  equal  to  the  conceptions  of  his  mental 
vision,  I  know  not,  never  having  seen  them. 
Main-d'ceuvre  is  frequently  wanting  where  the 
mind  is  most  powerful  Mr.  Blake  appears  un- 
learned in  all  that  concerns  this  world,  and,  from 
what  he  said,  I  should  fear  he  is  one  of  those 
whose  feelings  are  far  superior  to  his  situation  in  life. 
He  looks  care-worn  and  subdued ;  but  his  counten- 
ance radiated  as  he  spoke  of  his  favourite  pursuit, 
and  he  appeared  gratified  by  talking  to  a  person 
who  comprehended  his  feelings.  I  can  easily 
imagine  that  he  seldom  meets  with  any  one  who 
enters  into  his  views ;  for  they  are  peculiar,  and  ex- 
alted above  the  common  level  of  received  opinions. 
I  could  not  help  contrasting  this  humble  artist 
with  the  great  and  powerful  Sir  Thomas  Lawrence, 
and  thinking  that  the  one  was  fully  if  not  more 
worthy  of  the  distinction  and  the  fame  to  which 
the  other  has  attained,  but  from  which  he  is  far 
removed.  Mr.  Blake,  however,  though  he  may  have 
as  much  right,  from  talent  and  merit,  to  the 
advantages  of  which  Sir  Thomas  is  possessed, 
evidently  lacks  that  worldly  wisdom  and  that 
grace  of  manner  which  make  a  man  gain  an 
eminence  in  his  profession,  and  succeed  in  society. 
Every  word  he  uttered  spoke  the  perfect  simpli- 
city of  his  mind,  and  his  total  ignorance  of  all 

worldly  matters.     He  told  me  that  Lady  C 

L had  been  very  kind  to  him.     '  Ah  ! '  said 

he,  '  there  is  a  deal  of  kindness  in  that  lady.'     I 


LADY  CHARLOTTE  BURY'S  DIARY    335 

agreed  with  him,  and  though  it  was  impossible  not 
to  laugh  at  the  strange  manner  in  which  she  had 
arranged  this  party,  I  could  not  help  admiring  the 
goodness  of  heart  and  discrimination  of  •  talent 
which  had  made  her  patronise  this  unknown  artist. 
Sir  T.  Lawrence  looked  at  me  several  times  whilst 
I  was  talking  with  Mr.  B.,  and  I  saw  his  lips  curl 
with  a  sneer,  as  if  he  despised  me  for  conversing 
with  so  insignificant  a  person.1  It  was  very  evident 
Sir  Thomas  did  not  like  the  company  he  found 
himself  in,  though  he  was  too  well-bred  and  too 
prudent  to  hazard  a  remark  upon  the  subject. 
The  literati  were  also  of  various  degrees  of 

eminence,  beginning  with  Lord  B ,  and  ending 

with .     The  grandees  were  Lord  L ,  who 

appreciates  talent,  and  therefore  not  so  ill  assorted 

with    the   party   as  was  Mrs.  G and    Lady 

C ,    who    did    nothing   but  yawn  the  whole 

evening,  and   Mrs  A ,   who  all  looked  with 

evident  contempt  upon  the  surrounding  company. 

1  There  is  surely  some  mistake  in  this  supposition,  for  Sir 
T.  Lawrence  was,  afterwards  at  least,  one  of  Mr.  Blake's  great 
patrons  and  admirers. 


(IV.)  BLAKE'S  HOEOSCOPE 
1825 


[BLAKE'S  horoscope  was  cast  during  his  lifetime  in  Urania, 
or,  the  Astrologer's  Chronicle,  and  Mystical  Magazine ; 
edited  by  Merlinus  Anglicanus,  jun.,  the  Astrologer  of  the 
Nineteenth  Century,  assisted  by  the  Metropolitan  Society  of 
Occult  Philosophers  (No.  1,  London,  1825),  the  first  and  only 
number  of  an  astrological  magazine,  published  under  the 
pseudonym  of  Merlinus  Anglicanus  by  R.  C.  Smith,  an  astro- 
loger of  the  period,  and  it  is  highly  probable,  as  Dr.  Garnett 
suggests,  that  the  date  (confirmed  by  the  birth  register  at  St. 
James's,  Westminster)  was  derived  from  Varley,  who  would 
have  had  it  from  Blake  himself.  I  give  the  map,  not  as  it  is 
printed  in  the  book,  but  in  the  clearer  and  simpler  form  in 
which  it  was  copied  and  given  to  me  by  Dr.  Garnett.  I  am 
told  that  the  most  striking  thing  in  the  map,  from  an  astro- 
logical point  of  view,  is  the  position  and  aspect  of  Uranus,  the 
occult  planet,  which  indicate  in  the  highest  degree  '  an  inborn 
and  supreme  instinct  for  things  occult,'  without  showing  the 
least  tendency  towards  madness.  The  '  Nativity  of  Mr.  Blake ' 
is  the  last  entry,  p.  70.] 


William  Blake 
Nov.  28.  1757. 
7.45  P.M. 


NATIVITY    OF    MR    BLAKE, 
THE  MYSTICAL  ARTIST 

PLANETS'  LATITUDE 


D2.20S.      I      1;  1.14  8.      I    if  0.42  N.      I      $  2.02  N. 
I      $2.108.      | 


THE  above  horoscope  is  calculated  for  the  estimate 
time  of  birth,  and  Mr.  Blake,  the  subject  thereof, 
is  well  known  amongst  scientific  characters,  as 
having  a  most  peculiar  and  extraordinary  turn  of 
genius  and  vivid  imagination.  His  illustrations 
of  the  Book  of  Job  have  met  with  much  and 
deserved  praise  ;  indeed,  in  the  line  which  this 
artist  has  adopted,  he  is  perhaps  equalled  by  none 
of  the  present  day.  Mr.  Blake  is  no  less  peculiar 
and  outre  in  his  ideas,  as  he  seems  to  have  some 
curious  intercourse  with  the  invisible  world;  and, 
according  to  his  own  account  (in  which  he  is  cer- 
tainly, to  all  appearance,  perfectly  sincere),  he  is 
continually  surrounded  by  the  spirits  of  the  deceased 
of  all  ages,  nations,  and  countries.  He  has.  so  he 
affirms,  held  actual  conversations  with  Michael 
Angelo,  Eaphael,  Milton,  Dryden,  and  the  worthies 

339 


340  WILLIAM  BLAKE 

of  antiquity.  He  has  now  by  him  a  long  poem 
nearly  finished,  which  he  affirms  was  recited  to 
him  by  the  spirit  of  Milton ;  and  the  mystical 
drawings  of  this  gentleman  are  no  less  curious  and 
worthy  of  notice,  by  all  those  whose  minds  soar 
above  the  cloggings  of  this  terrestrial  element,  to 
which  we  are  most  of  us  too  fastly  chained  to  com- 
prehend the  nature  and  operations  of  the  world  of 
spirits. 

Mr.  Blake's  pictures  of  the  last  judgment,  his 
profiles  of  Wallace,  Edward  the  Sixth,  Harold, 
Cleopatra,  and  numerous  others  which  we  have 
seen,  are  really  wonderful  for  the  spirit  in  which 
they  are  delineated.  We  have  been  in  company 
with  this  gentleman  several  times,  and  have  fre- 
quently been  not  only  delighted  with  his  conversa- 
tion, but  also  filled  with  feelings  of  wonder  at  his 
extraordinary  faculties ;  which,  whatever  some 
may  say  to  the  contrary,  are  by  no  means  tinctured 
with  superstition,  as  he  certainly  believes  what  he 
promulgates.  Our  limits  will  not  permit  us  to 
enlarge  upon  this  geniture,  which  we  merely  give 
as  an  example  worthy  to  be  noticed  by  the  astro- 
logical student  in  his  list  of  remarkable  nativities. 
But  it  is  probable  that  the  extraordinary  faculties 
and  eccentricities  of  idea  which  this  gentleman 
possesses,  are  the  effects  of  the  Moon  in  Cancer  in 
the  twelfth  house  (both  sign  and  house  being  mys- 
tical), in  trine  to  Herschell  from  the  mystical  sign 
Pisces,  from  the  house  of  science,  and  from  the 


BLAKE'S   HOROSCOPE  341 

mundane  trine  to  Saturn  in  the  scientific  sign 
Aquarius,  which  latter  planet  is  in  square  to  Mer- 
cury in  Scorpio,  and  in  quintile  to  the  Sun  and 
Jupiter,  in  the  mystical  sign  Sagittarius.  The 
square  of  Mars  and  Mercury,  from  fixed  signs,  also, 
has  a  remarkable  tendency  to  sharpen  the  intellects, 
and  lay  the  foundation  of  extraordinary  ideas. 
There  are  also  many  other  reasons  for  the  strange 
peculiarities  above  noticed,  but  these  the  student 
will  no  doubt  readily  discover. 


(V.)  OBITUARY  NOTICES  IN  THE  '  LITER- 
ARY GAZETTE'  AND  'GENTLEMAN'S 
MAGAZINE;  1327. 


[OBITUARY  Notices  of  Blake  appeared  in  the  Literary  Gazette 
of  August  18,  1827  (pp.  540-41),  the  Gentleman's  Magazine,  of 
October  1827  (pp.  377-8),  and  the  Annual  Register  of  1827,  in  its 
Appendix  of  Deaths  (pp.  253-4).  The  notice  in  the  Gentleman's 
Magazine  is  largely  condensed  from  that  in  the  Literary  Gazette, 
but  with  a  different  opening,  which  I  have  given  after  the 
notice  in  the  Literary  Gazette.  The  notice  in  the  Annual 
Register  is  merely  condensed  from  the  Gentleman's  Magazine.  ] 


WILLIAM  BLAKE 
The  Illustrator  of  the  Grave,  etc. 

To  those  few  who  have  sympathies  for  the  ideal 
and  (comparatively  speaking)  the  intellectual  in 
art,  the  following  notice  is  addressed.  Few  persons 
of  taste  are  unacquainted  with  the  designs  by  Blake, 
appended  as  illustrations  to  a  4to  edition  of  Blair's 
Grave.  It  was  borne  forth  into  the  world  on  the 
warmest  praises  of  all  our  prominent  artists,  Hopp- 
ner,  Phillips,  Stothard,  Flaxman,  Opie,  Tresham, 
Westmacott,  Beechey,  Lawrence,  West,  Nbllekins, 
Shee,  Owen,  Rossi,  Thomson,  Cosway,  and  Soane ; 
and  doubly  assured  with  a  preface  by  the  learned 
and  severe  Fuseli,  the  latter  part  of  which  we  tran- 
scribe : — '  The  author  of  the  moral  series  before  us 
has  endeavoured  to  wake  sensibility  by  touching 
our  sympathies  with  nearer,  less  ambiguous,  and 
less  ludicrous  imagery,  than  what  mythology,  Gothic 
superstition,  or  symbols  as  far-fetched  as  inadequate 
could  supply.  His  invention  has  been  chiefly  em- 
ployed to  spread  a  familiar  and  domestic  atmo- 
sphere round  the  most  important  of  all  subjects — 

345 


346  WILLIAM   BLAKE 

to  connect  the  visible  and  the  invisible  world, 
without  provoking  probability — and  to  lead  the 
eye  from  the  milder  light  of  time  to  the  radiations 
of  eternity.  Such  is  the  plan  and  the  moral  part 
of  the  author's  invention ;  the  technic  part,  and  the 
execution  of  the  artist,  though  to  be  examined  by 
other  principles,  and  addressed  to  a  narrower  circle, 
equally  claim  approbation,  sometimes  excite  our 
wonder,  and  not  seldom  our  fears,  when  we  see 
him  play  on  the  very  verge  of  legitimate  invention  ; 
but  wildness  so  picturesque  in  itself,  so  often  re- 
deemed by  taste,  simplicity,  and  elegance — what 
child  of  fancy,  what  artist,  would  wish  to  discharge  ? 
The  groups  and  single  figures,  on  their  own  basis, 
abstracted  from  the  general  composition,  and  con- 
sidered without  attention  to  the  plan,  frequently 
exhibit  those  genuine  and  unaffected  attitudes, 
those  simple  graces,  which  nature  and  the  heart 
alone  can  dictate,  and  only  an  eye  inspired  by 
both  discover.  Every  class  of  artists,  in  every 
stage  of  their  progress  and  attainments,  from  the 
student  to  the  finished  master,  and  from  the 
contriver  of  ornament  to  the  painter  of  history, 
will  here  find  materials  of  art,  and  hints  of  im- 
provement ! ' 

When  it  is  stated,  that  the  pure-minded  Flax- 
man  pointed  out  to  an  eminent  literary  man  the 
obscurity  of  Blake  as  a  melancholy  proof  of  Eng- 
lish apathy  towards  the  grand,  the  philosophic,  or 
the  enthusiastically  devotional  painter;  and  that 


OBITUARY  NOTICES  347 

he  (Blake)  has  been  several  times  employed  for 
that  truly  admirable  judge  of  art,  Sir  T.  Lawrence, 
any  further  testimony  to  his  extraordinary  powers 
is  unnecessary.  Yet  has  Blake  been  allowed  to 
exist  in  a  penury  which  most  artists l — beings 
necessarily  of  a  sensitive  temperament — would 
deem  intolerable.  Pent,  with  his  affectionate  wife, 
in  a  close  back-room  in  one  of  the  Strand  courts, 
his  bed  in  one  corner,  his  meagre  dinner  in  another, 
a  ricketty  table  holding  his  copper-plates  in  pro- 
gress, his  colours,  books  (among  which  his  Bible, 
a  Sessi  Velutello's  Dante,  and  Mr.  Carey's  trans- 
lation, were  at  the  top),  his  large  drawings,  sketches, 
and  MSS. ; — his  ankles  frightfully  swelled,  his  chest 
disordered,  old  age  striding  on,  his  wants  increased, 
but  not  his  miserable  means  and  appliances :  even 
yet  was  his  eye  undinimed,  the  fire  of  his  imagina- 
tion unquenched,  and  the  preternatural,  never- 
resting  activity  of  his  mind  unflagging.  He  had 
not  merely  a  calmly  resigned,  but  a  cheerful  and 
mirthful  countenance ;  in  short,  he  was  a  living 
commentary  on  Jeremy  Taylor's  beautiful  chapter 
on  Contentedness.  He  took  no  thought  for  his 
life,  what  he  should  eat,  or  what  he  should  drink ; 
nor  yet  for  his  body,  what  he  should  put  on ;  but 
had  a  fearless  confidence  in  that  Providence  which 
had  given  him  the  vast  range  of  the  world  for  his 
recreation  and  delight. 

1  The  term  is  employed  in  its  generic  and  comprehensive 
sense. 


348  WILLIAM  BLAKE 

Blake  died  last  Monday !  Died  as  he  lived ! 
piously  cheerful,  talking  calmly,  and  finally  resign- 
ing himself  to  his  eternal  rest,  like  an  infant  to  its 
sleep.  He  has  left  nothing  except  some  pictures, 
copper-plates,  and  his  principal  work  of  a  series  of 
a  hundred  large  designs  from  Dante. 

William  Blake  was  brought  up  under  Basire, 
the  eminent  engraver.  He  was  active  in  mind  and 
body,  passing  from  one  occupation  to  another, 
without  an  intervening  minute  of  repose.  Of  an 
ardent,  affectionate,  and  grateful  temper,  he  was 
simple  in  manner  and  address,  and  displayed  an 
inbred  courteousness,  of  the  most  agreeable  char- 
acter. Next  November  he  would  have  been  sixty- 
nine.  At  the  age  of  sixty-six  he  commenced  the 
study  of  Italian,  for  the  sake  of  reading  Dante  in 
the  original,  which  he  accomplished  ! 

His  widow  is  left  (we  fear,  from  the  accounts 
which  have  reached  us)  in  a  very  forlorn  condition, 
Mr.  Blake  having  latterly  been  much  indebted  for 
succour  and  consolation  to  his  friend  Mr.  Linnell, 
the  painter.  We  have  no  doubt  but  her  cause  will 
be  taken  up  by  the  distributors  of  those  funds 
which  are  raised  for  the  relief  of  distressed  artists, 
and  also  by  the  benevolence  of  private  individuals. 

When  further  time  has  been  allowed  us  for 
inquiry,  we  shall  probably  resume  this  matter ;  at 
present  (owing  the  above  information  to  the  kind- 
ness of  a  correspondent)  we  can  only  record  the 
death  of  a  singular  and  very  able  man. 


OBITUARY  NOTICES  349 

II 

ME.  WILLIAM  BLAKE 

Aug.  13,  aged  68,  Mr.  William  Blake,  an  excel- 
lent, but  eccentric,  artist. 

He  was  a  pupil  of  the  engraver  Basire ;  and 
among  his  earliest  productions  were  eight  beautiful 
plates  in  the  Novelist's  Magazine.  In  1793  he 
published  in  12mo,  'The  Gates  of  Paradise,'  a 
very  small  book  for  children,  containing  fifteen 
plates  of  emblems ;  and  '  published  by  W.  B.,  1 3 
Hercules  Buildings,  Lambeth ' ;  also  about  the 
same  time,  '  Songs  of  Experience,  with  plates ' ; 
'  America  ;  a  Prophecy,'  folio,  and  '  Europe,  a  Pro- 
phecy,' 1794,  folio.  These  are  now  become 
very  scarce.  In  1797  he  commenced,  in  large 
folio,  an  edition  of  Young's  Night  Thoughts,  of 
which  every  page  was  a  design,  but  only  one 
number  was  published.  In  1805  were  produced 
in  8vo  numbers,  containing  five  engravings  by 
Blake,  some  ballads  by  Mr.  Hayley,  but  which 
also  were  abruptly  discontinued.  Few  persons  of 
taste  are  unacquainted  with  the  designs  by  Blake, 
engraved  by  Schiavonetti,  as  illustrations  to  a  4to 
edition  of  Blair's  Grave.  They  are  twelve  in 
number,  and  an  excellent  portrait  of  Blake,  from  a 
picture  by  T.  Phillips,  E.A.,  is  prefixed.  It  was 
borne  forth  .  .  .  [Here  follows  the  third  sentence, 
p.  345  above,  to  the  end  of  the  paragraph.] 


350  WILLIAM  BLAKE 

In  1809  was  published  in  12mo,  '  A  Descriptive 
Catalogue  of  [sixteen]  pictures,  poetical  and  histori- 
cal inventions,  painted  by  William  Blake  in  water- 
colours,  being  the  ancient  method  of  fresco  painting 
restored,  and  drawings,  for  public  inspection,  and 
for  sale  by  private  contract.'  Among  these  was  a 
design  of  Chaucer's  Pilgrimage  to  Canterbury, 
from  which  an  etching  has  been  published.  Mr. 
Blake's  last  publication  is  a  set  of  engravings  to 
illustrate  the  Book  of  Job.  To  Fuseli's  testimony 
of  his  merit  above  quoted,  it  is  sufficient  to  add, 
that  he  has  been  employed  by  that  truly  admirable 
judge  of  art,  Sir  Thomas  Lawrence  ;  and  that  the 
pure-minded  Flaxman.  .  .  . 

[The  remainder  is  condensed  from  the  Literary 
Gazette,  p.  346  above,  with  the  occasional  change 
of  a  word,  or  the  order  of  a  sentence.] 


(VI.)  EXTKACT  FROM  VAELEY'S  ZODIACAL 
PHYSIOGNOMY.     1828. 


JOHN  VARLEY,  astrologer  and  water-colour  painter,  was 
introduced  to  Blake  by  Linnell,  and  it  was  for  him  that  Blake 
did  the  '  visionary  heads  '  described  by  Allan  Cunningham,  p. 
420  below.  '  The  Ghost  of  a  Flea '  exists  in  both  forms  de- 
scribed by  Varley,  in  a  sketch  of  the  head  (which  he  reproduces, 
engraved  by  Linnell,  in  a  plate  at  the  end  of  his  book,  together 
with  two  other  heads  in  outline),  and  in  a  full-length  picture 
in  tempera.  The  passage  which  follows  is  taken  from  pp. 
54,  55  of  'A  Treatise  on  Zodiacal  Physiognomy  ;  illustrated 
with  engravings  of  heads  and  features  ;  accompanied  by  tables 
of  the  times  of  rising  of  the  twelve  signs  of  the  Zodiac  ;  and 
containing  also  new  and  astrological  explanation  of  some  re- 
markable portions  of  Ancient  Mythological  History.'  By  John 
Varley.  London  :  Printed  for  the  Author,  1828.] 


EXTEACT  FKOM  VARLEY'S  ZODIACAL 
PHYSIOGNOMY 

WITH  respect  to  the  vision  of  the  Ghost  of  the 
Flea,  seen  by  Blake,  it  agrees  in  countenance  with 
one  class  of  people  under  Gemini,  which  sign  is 
the  significator  of  the  Flea;  whose  brown  colour 
is  appropriate  to  the  colour  of  the  eyes  in  some 
full-toned  Gemini  persons.  And  the  neatness,  elas- 
ticity, and  tenseness  of  the  Flea  are  significant  of  the 
elegant  dancing  and  fencing  sign  Gemini.  This  spirit 
visited  his  imagination  in  such  a  figure  as  he  never 
anticipated  in  an  insect.  As  I  was  anxious  to 
make  the  most  correct  investigation  in  my  power, 
of  the  truth  of  these  visions,  on  hearing  of  this 
spiritual  apparition  of  a  Flea,  I  asked  him  if  he 
could  draw  for  me  the  resemblance  of  what  he  saw : 
he  instantly  said,  '  I  see  him  now  before  me/  I 
therefore  gave  him  paper  and  a  pencil,  with  which 
he  drew  the  portrait,  of  which  a  facsimile  is  given 
in  this  number.  I  felt  convinced  by  his  mode  of 
proceeding  that  he  had  a  real  image  before  him, 
for  he  left  off,  and  began  on  another  part  of  the 
paper  to  make  a  separate  drawing  of  the  mouth  of 
the  Flea,  which  the  spirit  having  opened,  he  was 
prevented  from  proceeding  with  the  first  sketch, 

z 


354  WILLIAM  BLAKE 

till  he  had  closed  it.  During  the  time  occupied 
in  completing  the  drawing,  the  Flea  told  him  that 
all  fleas  were  inhabited  by  the  souls  of  such  men 
as  were  by  nature  blood-thirsty  to  excess,  and  were 
therefore  providentially  confined  to  the  size  and 
form  of  insects ;  otherwise,  were  he  himself,  for 
instance,  the  size  of  a  horse,  he  would  depopulate 
a  great  portion  of  the  country.  He  added,  that 
if  in  attempting  to  leap  from  one  island  to  another, 
he  should  fall  into  the  sea,  he  could  swim,  and 
should  not  be  lost.  This  spirit  afterwards  appeared 
to  Blake,  and  afforded  him  a  view  of  his  whole 
figure ;  an  engraving  of  which  I  shall  give  in  this 
work. 


(VII.)  BIOGRAPHICAL  SKETCH  OF  BLAKE 
BY  J.  T.  SMITH.     1828 


[THE  Memoir  of  Blake  by  John  Thomas  Smith,  Keeper  of  the 
Prints  and  Drawings  in  the  British  Museum,  is  the  last  of  the 
'  Biographical  Sketches  and  Anecdotes  of  several  Artists  and 
others  contemporary  with  Nollekens,'  contained  in  the  second 
volume  of  '  Nollekens  and  his  Times  :  comprehending  a  Life 
of  that  celebrated  Sculptor  ;  and  Memoirs  of  several  contem- 
porary Artists,  from  the  time  of  Roubiliac,  Hogarth,  and 
Reynolds,  to  that  of  Fuseli,  Flaxman,  and  Blake. '  (London  : 
Henry  Colburn,  New  Burlington  Street,  1828.)  It  contains 
more  facts  at  first  hand  than  any  other  account  of  Blake,  and 
is  really  the  foundation  of  all  subsequent  biographies.  I  have 
added  a  page,  which  is  not  without  its  significance,  from  a 
later  book  by  Smith,  '  A  Book  for  a  Rainy  j^Day  ;  or,  Recollec- 
tions of  the  Events  of  the  last  Sixty-five  Years'  (1845),  where 
it  occurs  under  date  1784,  on  pp.  81,  82.] 


BIOGEAPHICAL  SKETCH  OF  BLAKE 

I  BELIEVE  it  has  been  invariably  the  custom  of 
every  age,  whenever  a  man  has  been  found  to  depart 
from  the  usual  mode  of  thinking,  to  consider  him 
of  deranged  intellect,  and  not  unfrequently  stark 
staring  mad;  which  judgment  his  calumniators 
would  pronounce  with  as  little  hesitation,  as  some 
of  the  uncharitable  part  of  mankind  would  pass 
sentence  of  death  upon  a  poor  half-drowned  cur 
who  had  lost  his  master,  or  one  who  had  escaped 
hanging  with  a  rope  about  his  neck.  Cowper,  in 
a  letter  to  Lady  Hesketh,  dated  June  3,  1788, 
speaking  of  a  dancing-master's  advertisement,  says, 
'  The  author  of  it  had  the  good  hap  to  be  crazed, 
or  he  had  never  produced  anything  half  so  clever ; 
for  you  will  ever  observe,  that  they  who  are  said 
to  have  lost  their  wits,  have  more  than  other 
people.' 

Bearing  this  stigma  of  eccentricity,  William 
Blake,  with  most  extraordinary  zeal,  commenced 
his  efforts  in  Art  under  the  roof  of  No.  28  Broad 
Street,  Carnaby  Market ;  in  which  house  he  was 
born,  and  where  his  father  carried  on  the  business 
of  a  hosier.  William,  the  subject  of  the  following 

867 


358  WILLIAM  BLAKE 

pages,  who  was  his  second  son,  showing  an  early 
stretch  of  mind,  and  a  strong  talent  for  drawing, 
being  totally  destitute  of  the  dexterity  of  a  London 
shopman,  so  well  described  by  Dr.  Johnson,  was 
sent  away  from  the  counter  as  a  booby,  and  placed 
under  the  late  Mr.  James  Basire,  an  artist  well 
known  for  many  years  as  engraver  to  the  Society  of 
Antiquaries.  From  him  he  learned  the  mechanical 
part  of  his  art,  and  as  he  drew  carefully,  and  copied 
faithfully,  his  master  frequently  and  confidently 
employed  him  to  make  drawings  from  monuments 
to  be  engraven. 

After  leaving  his  instructor,  in  whose  house  he 
had  conducted  himself  with  the  strictest  propriety, 
he  became  acquainted  with  Flaxman,  the  sculptor, 
through  his  friend  Stothard,  and  was  also  honoured 
by  an  introduction  to  the  accomplished  Mrs. 
Mathew,  whose  house,  No.  27,  in  Eathbone  Place, 
was  then  frequented  by  most  of  the  literary  and 
talented  people  of  the  day.  This  lady — to  whom 
I  also  had  the  honour  of  being  known,  and  whose 
door  and  purse  were  constantly  open  and  ready  to 
cherish  persons  of  genius  who  stood  in  need  of 
assistance  in  their  learned  and  arduous  pursuits, 
worldly  concerns,  or  inconveniences — was  so  ex- 
tremely zealous  in  promoting  the  celebrity  of  Blake, 
that  upon  hearing  him  read  some  of  his  early  efforts 
in  poetry,  she  thought  so  well  of  them,  as  to  request 
the  Kev.  Henry  Mathew,  her  husband,  to  join  Mr. 
Flaxman  in  his  truly  kind  offer  of  defraying  the 


BIOGRAPHICAL  SKETCH  OF  BLAKE    359 

expense  of  printing  them ;  in  which  he  not  only 
acquiesced,  but,  with  his  usual  urbanity,  wrote  the 
following  advertisement,  which  precedes  the  poems  : 

'  The  following  sketches  were  the  production  of  an  un- 
tutored youth,  commenced  in  his  twelfth,  and  occasionally 
resumed  by  the  author  till  his  twentieth  year ;  since  which 
time,  his  talents  having  been  wholly  directed  to  the  attain- 
ment of  excellence  in  his  profession,  he  has  been  deprived 
of  the  leisure  requisite  to  such  a  revisal  of  these  sheets, 
as  might  have  rendered  them  less  unfit  to  meet  the  public 
eye. 

'  Conscious  of  the  irregularities  and  defects  to  be  found 
in  almost  every  page,  his  friends  have  still  believed  that 
they  possessed  a  poetical  originality,  which  merited  some 
respite  from  oblivion.  These,  their  opinions,  remain,  how- 
ever, to  be  now  reproved  or  confirmed  by  a  less  partial 
public.' 

The  annexed  Song  is  a  specimen  of  the  juvenile 
playfulness  of  Blake's  muse,  copied  from  page  10 
of  these  Poems.1 

SONG 

'  How  sweet  I  roam'd  from  field  to  field, 

And  tasted  all  the  Summer's  pride, 
Till  I  the  Prince  of  Love  beheld, 
Who  in  the  sunny  beams  did  glide  ! 

'  He  show'd  me  lilies  for  my  hair, 

And  blushing  roses  for  my  brow ; 
He  led  me  through  his  gardens  fair, 
Where  all  his  golden  pleasures  grow. 

1  The  whole  copy  of  this  little  work,  entitled  '  Poetical 
Sketches,  by  W.  B.,'  containing  seventy  pages,  octavo,  bear- 
ing the  date  of  1783,  was  given  to  Blake  to  sell  to  friends,  or 
publish,  as  he  might  think  proper. 


360  WILLIAM  BLAKE 

'  With  sweet  May-dews  my  wings  were  wet, 

And  Phoebus  fired  my  vocal  rage ; 
He  caught  me  in  his  silken  net, 
And  shut  me  in  his  golden  cage. 

'  He  loves  to  sit  and  hear  me  sing, 

Then,  laughing,  sports  and  plays  with  me ; 
Then  stretches  out  my  golden  wing, 
And  mocks  my  loss  of  liberty.' 

But  it  happened,  unfortunately,  soon  after  this 
period,  that  in  consequence  of  his  unbending  de- 
portment, or  what  his  adherents  are  pleased  to 
call  his  manly  firmness  of  opinion,  which  certainly 
was  not  at  all  times  considered  pleasing  by  every 
one,  his  visits  were  not  so  frequent.  He,  however, 
continued  to  benefit  by  Mrs.  Mathew's  liberality, 
and  was  enabled  to  continue  in  partnership,  as  a 
printseller,  with  his  fellow-pupil,  Parker,  in  a  shop, 
No.  27,  next  door  to  his  father's,  in  Broad  Street ; 
and  being  extremely  partial  to  Robert,  his  youngest 
brother,  considered  him  as  his  pupil.  Bob,  as  he 
was  familiarly  called,  was  one  of  my  playfellows, 
and  much  beloved  by  all  his  companions. 

Much  about  this  time,  Blake  wrote  many  other 
songs,  to  which  he  also  composed  tunes.  These 
he  would  occasionally  sing  to  his  friends ;  and 
though,  according  to  his  confession,  he  was  entirely 
unacquainted  with  the  science  of  music,  his  ear 
was  so  good,  that  his  tunes  were  sometimes  most 
singularly  beautiful,  and  were  noted  down  by 
musical  professors.  As  for  his  later  poetry,  if  it 


BIOGRAPHICAL  SKETCH  OF  BLAKE    361 

may  be  so  called,  attached  to  his  plates,  though  it 
was  certainly  in  some  parts  enigmatically  curious 
as  to  its  application,  yet  it  was  not  always  wholly 
uninteresting ;  and  I  have  unspeakable  pleasure  in 
being  able  to  state,  that  though  I  admit  he  did 
not  for  the  last  forty  years  attend  any  place  of 
Divine  worship,yet  he  was  not  a  Freethinker,  as  some 
invidious  detractors  have  thought  proper  to  assert, 
nor  was  he  ever  in  any  degree  irreligious.  Through 
life,  his  Bible  was  everything  with  him ;  and  as  a 
convincing  proof  how  highly  he  reverenced  the 
Almighty,  I  shall  introduce  the  following  lines  with 
which  he  concludes  his  address  to  the  Deists  : 

'  For  a  tear  is  an  intellectual  thing  ; 
And  a  sigh  is  the  sword  of  an  Angel-King  • 
And  the  bitter  groan  of  a  Martyr's  woe 
Is  an  arrow  from  the  Almighty's  bow.' 

Again,  at  page  77,  in  his  address  to  the  Christians : 

1 1  give  you  the  end  of  a  golden  string ; 

Only  wind  it  into  a  ball, 
It  will  lead  you  in  at  Heaven's  gate, 
Built  in  Jerusalem's  wall.' 

In  his  choice  of  subjects,  and  in  his  designs  in 
Art,  perhaps  no  man  had  higher  claim  to  originality, 
nor  ever  drew  with  a  closer  adherence  to  his  own 
conception ;  and  from  what  I  knew  of  him,  and 
have  heard  related  by  his  friends,  I  most  firmly 
believe  few  artists  have  been  guilty  of  less  plagi- 
arisms than  he.  It  is  true,  I  have  seen  him  admire 


362  WILLIAM  BLAKE 

and  heard  him  expatiate  upon  the  beauties  of  Marc 
Antonio  and  of  Albert  Diirer ;  but  I  verily  believe 
not  with  any  view  of  borrowing  an  idea ;  neither 
do  I  consider  him  at  any  time  dependent  in  his 
mode  of  working,  which  was  generally  with  the 
graver  only  ;  and  as  to  printing,  he  mostly  took  off 
his  own  impressions. 

After  his  marriage,  which  took  place  at  Batter- 
sea,  and  which  proved  a  mutually  happy  one,  he 
instructed  his  beloved,  for  so  he  most  frequently 
called  his  Kate,1  and  allowed  her,  till  the  last 
moment  of  his  practice,  to  take  off  his  proof  im- 
pressions and  print  his  works,  which  she  did  most 
carefully,  and  ever  delighted  in  the  task :  nay,  she 
became  a  draughtswoman ;  and  as  a  convincing 
proof  that  she  and  her  husband  were  born  for  each 
other's  comfort,  she  not  only  entered  cheerfully 
into  his  views,  but,  what  is  curious,  possessed  a 
similar  power  of  imbibing  ideas,  and  has  produced 
drawings  equally  original  and,  in  some  respects, 
interesting. 

Blake's  peace  of  mind,  as  well  as  that  of  his 

1  A  friend  has  favoured  me  with  the  following  anecdotes, 
which  he  received  from  Blake,  respecting  his  courtship.  He 
states  that  '  Our  Artist  fell  in  love  with  a  lively  little  girl,  who 
allowed  him  to  say  everything  that  was  loving,  but  would  not 
listen  to  his  overtures  on  the  score  of  matrimony.  He  was 
lamenting  this  in  the  house  of  a  friend,  when  a  generous-hearted 
lass  declared  that  she  pitied  him  from  her  heart.  "  Do  you 
pity  me?"  asked  Blake.  "Yes;  I  do,  most  sincerely." — 
"Then,"  said  he,  "I  love  you  for  that."— "Well,"  said  the 
honest  girl,  "and  I  love  you."  The  consequence  was,  they 
were  married,  and  lived  the  happiest  of  lives.' 


BIOGRAPHICAL  SKETCH  OF  BLAKE    363 

Catherine,  was  much  broken  by  the  death  of  their 
brother  Robert,  who  was  a  most  amicable  link  in 
their  happiness ;  and,  as  a  proof  how  much  Blake 
respected  him,  whenever  he  beheld  him  in  his 
visions,  he  implicitly  attended  to  his  opinion  and 
advice  as  to  his  future  projected  works.  I  should 
have  stated,  that  Blake  was  supereminently  en- 
dowed with  the  power  of  disuniting  all  other 
thoughts  from  his  mind,  whenever  he  wished  to 
indulge  in  thinking  of  any  particular  subject ;  and 
so  firmly  did  he  believe,  by  this  abstracting  power, 
that  the  objects  of  his  compositions  were  before  him 
in  his  mind's  eye,  that  he  frequently  believed  them 
to  be  speaking  to  him.  This  I  shall  now  illustrate 
by  the  following  narrative. 

Blake,  after  deeply  perplexing  himself  as  to  the 
mode  of  accomplishing  the  publication  of  his  illus- 
trated songs,  without  their  being  subject  to  the 
expense  of  letterpress,  his  brother  Robert  stood 
before  him  in  one  of  his  visionary  imaginations, 
and  so  decidedly  directed  him  in  the  way  in  which 
he  ought  to  proceed,  that  he  immediately  followed 
his  advice,  by  writing  his  poetry,  and  drawing  his 
marginal  subjects  of  embellishments  in  outline  upon 
the  copper- plate  with  an  impervious  liquid,  and 
then  eating  the  plain  parts  or  lights  away  with 
aqua-fortis  considerably  below  them,  so  that  the 
outlines  were  left  as  a  stereotype.  The  plates  in 
this  state  were  then  printed  in  any  tint  that  he 
wished,  to  enable  him  or  Mrs.  Blake  to  colour  the 


364  WILLIAM  BLAKE 

marginal  figures  up  by  hand  in  imitation  of 
drawings. 

The  following  are  some  of  his  works  produced 
in  this  manner,  viz. ;  '  Songs  of  Innocence  and  Songs 
of  Experience/  '  The  Book  of  Jerusalem,'  consisting 
of  an  hundred  plates,  '  The  Marriage  of  Heaven  and 
Hell,'  '  Europe  and  America ' ;  and  another  work, 
which  is  now  very  uncommon,  a  pretty  little  series 
of  plates,  entitled  '  Gate  of  Paradise.' 

Blake,  like  those  artists  absorbed  in  a  beloved 
study,  cared  not  for  money  beyond  its  use  for  the 
ensuing  day ;  and  indeed  he  and  his  '  beloved '  were 
so  reciprocally  frugal  in  their  expenses,  that,  never 
sighing  for  either  gilded  vessels,  silver-laced  attend- 
ants, or  turtle's  livers,  they  were  contented  with 
the  simplest  repast,  and  a  little  answered  their 
purpose.  Yet,  notwithstanding  all  their  economy, 
Dame  Fortune  being,  as  it  is  pretty  well  known  to 
the  world,  sometimes  a  fickle  jade,  they,  as  well  as 
thousands  more,  have  had  their  intercepting  clouds. 

As  it  is  not  my  intention  to  follow  them  through 
their  lives,  I  shall  confine  myself  to  a  relation  of 
a  few  other  anecdotes  of  this  happy  pair ;  and  as 
they  are  connected  with  the  Arts,  in  my  opinion 
they  ought  not  to  be  lost,  as  they  may  be  considered 
worthy  the  attention  of  future  biographers. 

For  his  marginal  illustrations  of  '  Young's  Night 
Thoughts,'  which  possess  a  great  power  of  imagina- 
tion, he  received  so  despicably  low  a  price,  that 
Flaxman,  whose  heart  was  ever  warm,  was  deter- 


BIOGRAPHICAL  SKETCH  OF  BLAKE    365 

mined  to  serve  him  whenever  an  opportunity 
offered  itself;  and  with  his  usual  voice  of  sym- 
pathy, introduced  him  to  his  friend  Hayley,  with 
whom  it  was  no  new  thing  to  give  pleasure,  capri- 
cious as  he  was.  This  gentleman  immediately 
engaged  him  to  engrave  the  plates  for  his  quarto 
edition  of  'The  Life  of  Cowper/  published  in  1803-4 ; 
and  for  this  purpose  he  went  down  to  Felpham, 
in  order  to  be  near  that  highly  respected  Hermit. 

Here  he  took  a  cottage,  for  which  he  paid  twenty 
pounds  a  year,  and  was  not,  as  has  been  reported, 
entertained  in  a  house  belonging  to  Mr.  Hayley 
rent-free.  During  his  stay  he  drew  several  por- 
traits, and  could  have  had  full  employment  in  that 
department  of  the  Art ;  but  he  was  born  to  follow 
his  own  inclinations,  and  was  willing  to  rely  upon 
a  reward  for  the  labours  of  the  day. 

Mr.  Flaxman,  knowing  me  to  be  a  collector  of 
autographs,  among  many  others,  gave  me  the  follow- 
ing letter,  which  he  received  from  Blake  imme- 
diately after  his  arrival  at  Felpham,  in  which  he 
styles  him 

'  DEAR  SCULPTOR  OF  ETERNITY, 

'  We  are  safe  arrived  at  our  cottage,  which  is  more 
beautiful  than  I  thought  it,  and  more  convenient.  It  is 
a  perfect  model  for  cottages,  and,  I  think,  for  palaces  of 
magnificence ;  only  enlarging,  not  altering,  its  proportions, 
and  adding  ornaments  and  not  principals.  Nothing  can 
be  more  grand  than  its  simplicity  and  usefulness.  Simple 
without  intricacy,  it  seems  to  be  the  spontaneous  effusion 
of  humanity,  congenial  to  the  wants  of  man.  No  other- 


366  WILLIAM   BLAKE 

formed  house  can  ever  please  me  so  well ;  nor  shall  I  ever 
be  persuaded,  I  believe,  that  it  can  be  improved  either  in 
beauty  or  use. 

c  Mr.  Hayley  received  us  with  his  usual  brotherly  affec- 
tion. I  have  begun  to  work.  Felpham  is  a  sweet  place 
for  study,  because  it  is  more  spiritual  than  London. 
Heaven  opens  here  on  all  sides  her  golden  gates;  her 
windows  are  not  obstructed  by  vapours  ;  voices  of  celestial 
inhabitants  are  more  distinctly  heard,  and  their  forms 
more  distinctly  seen,  and  my  cottage  is  also  a  shadow  of 
their  houses.  My  wife  and  sister  are  both  well,  courting 
Neptune  for  an  embrace. 

'  Our  journey  was  very  pleasant ;  and  though  we  had 
a  great  deal  of  luggage,  no  grumbling.  All  was  cheer- 
fulness and  good-humour  on  the  road,  and  yet  we  could 
not  arrive  at  our  cottage  before  half-past  eleven  at  night, 
owing  to  the  necessary  shifting  of  our  luggage  from  one 
chaise  to  another ;  for  we  had  seven  different  chaises,  and 
as  many  different  drivers.  We  set  out  between  six  and 
seven  in  the  morning  of  Thursday,  with  sixteen  heavy 
boxes,  and  portfolios  full  of  prints. 

'  And  now  begins  a  new  life,  because  another  covering 
of  earth  is  shaken  off.  I  am  more  famed  in  Heaven  for 
my  works  than  I  could  well  conceive.  In  my  brain  are 
studies  and  chambers  filled  with  books  and  pictures  of 
old,  which  I  wrote  and  painted  in  ages  of  eternity,  before 
my  mortal  life ;  and  those  works  are  the  delight  and  study 
of  archangels.  Why  then  should  I  be  anxious  about  the 
riches  or  fame  of  mortality  ?  The  Lord,  our  father,  will 
do  for  us  and  with  us  according  to  his  Divine  will  for  our 
good. 

'  You,  O  dear  Flaxman  !  are  a  sublime  Archangel,  my 
friend  and  companion  from  eternity.  In  the  Divine 
bosom  is  our  dwelling-place.  I  look  back  into  the  regions 
of  reminiscence,  and  behold  our  ancient  days  before  this 
earth  appeared  in  its  vegetated  mortality  to  my  mortal- 
vegetated  eyes.  I  see  our  houses  of  eternity  which  can 


BIOGRAPHICAL  SKETCH  OF  BLAKE    367 

never  be  separated,  though  our  mortal  vehicles  should 
stand  at  the  remotest  corners  of  Heaven  from  each  other. 
'  Farewell,  my  best  friend !  Kemember  me  and  my 
wife  in  love  and  friendship  to  our  dear  Mrs.  Flaxman, 
whom  we  ardently  desire  to  entertain  beneath  our  thatched 
roof  of  rusted  gold ;  and  believe  me  for  ever  to  remain, 

'  Your  grateful  and  affectionate, 

'  WILLIAM  BLAKE. 
'FELPHAM,  Sept.  21,  1800. 
'  Sunday  morning.' 

In  a  copy  of  Hay  ley's '  Triumphs  of  Temper/  illus- 
trated by  Stothard,  which  had  been  the  one  belong- 
ing to  the  Author's  son,  and  which  he  gave  after 
his  death  to  Blake,  are  these  verses  in  MS.  by  the 
hand  of  the  donor : 

'  Accept,  my  gentle  visionary,  Blake, 

Whose  thoughts  are  fanciful  and  kindly  mild ; 
Accept,  and  fondly  keep  for  friendship's  sake, 
This  favor'd  vision,  my  poetic  child. 

'  Kich  in  more  grace  than  fancy  ever  won, 

To  thy  most  tender  mind  this  book  will  be, 
For  it  belong'd  to  my  departed  son ; 
So  from  an  angel  it  descends  to  thee. 

W.  H. 
'July,  1800.' * 

Upon  his  return  from  Felpham,  he  addressed 
the  public,  in  page  3  of  his  Book  of  Jerusalem,  in 
these  words,  '  After  my  three  years'  slumber  on  the 

1  I  copied  the  above  from  the  book  now  in  the  possession  of 
Mrs.  Blake. 


368  WILLIAM  BLAKE 

banks  of  the  ocean,  I  again  display  my  giant-forms 
to  the  public,'  etc. 

Some  of  the  '  giant-forms,'  as  he  calls  them,  are 
mighty  and  grand,  and  if  I  were  to  compare  them 
to  the  style  of  any  preceding  artist,  Michel  Angelo, 
Sir  Joshua's  favourite,  would  be  the  one ;  and  were 
I  to  select  a  specimen  as  a  corroboration  of  this 
opinion,  I  should  instance  the  figure  personifying 
the  'Ancient  of  Days,'  the  frontispiece  to  his 
'  Europe,  a  Prophecy.'  In  my  mind,  his  knowledge 
of  drawing,  as  well  as  design,  displayed  in  this 
figure,  must  at  once  convince  the  informed  reader 
of  his  extraordinary  abilities. 

I  am  now  under  the  painful  necessity  of  relating 
an  event  promulgated  in  two  different  ways  by 
two  different  parties ;  and  as  I  entertain  a  high 
respect  for  the  talents  of  both  persons  concerned, 
I  shall,  in  order  to  steer  clear  of  giving  umbrage 
to  the  supporters  of  either,  leave  the  reader  to  draw 
his  own  conclusions,  unbiassed  by  any  insinuation 
whatever  of  mine. 

An  engraver  of  the  name  of  Cromek,  a  man  who 
endeavoured  to  live  by  speculating  upon  the  talents 
of  others,  purchased  a  series  of  drawings  of  Blake, 
illustrative  of  Blair's  '  Grave,'  which  he  had  begun 
with  a  view  of  engraving  and  publishing.  These 
were  sold  to  Mr.  Cromek  for  the  insignificant 
sum  of  one  guinea  each,  with  the  promise,  and 
indeed  under  the  express  agreement,  that  Blake 
should  be  employed  to  engrave  them  ;  a  task  to 


BIOGRAPHICAL  SKETCH  OF  BLAKE    369 

which  he  looked  forward  with  anxious  delight. 
Instead  of  this  negotiation  being  carried  into  effect, 
the  drawings,  to  his  great  mortification,  were  put 
into  the  hands  of  Schiavonetti.  During  the  time  this 
artist  was  thus  employed,  Cromek  had  asked  Blake 
what  work  he  had  in  mind  to  execute  next.  The 
unsuspecting  artist  not  only  told  him,  but  without 
the  least  reserve  showed  him  the  designs  sketched 
out  for  a  fresco  picture ;  the  subject  Chaucer's 
'  Pilgrimage  to  Canterbury ' ;  with  which  Mr. 
Cromek  appeared  highly  delighted.  Shortly  after 
this,  Blake  discovered  that  Stothard,  a  brother- artist 
to  whom  he  had  been  extremely  kind  in  early  days, 
had  been  employed  to  paint  a  picture,  not  only 
of  the  same  subject,  but  in  some  instances  similar 
to  the  fresco  sketch  which  he  had  shown  to  Mr. 
Cromek.  The  picture  painted  by  Stothard  became 
the  property  of  Mr.  Cromek,  who  published  pro- 
posals for  an  engraving  from  it,  naming  Bromley 
as  the  engraver  to  be  employed.  However,  in  a 
short  time,  that  artist's  name  was  withdrawn,  and 
Schiavonetti's  substituted,  who  lived  only  to  com- 
plete the  etching ;  the  plate  being  finished  after- 
wards by  at  least  three  different  hands.  Blake, 
highly  indignant  at  this  treatment,  immediately 
set  to  work,  and  proposed  an  engraving  from  his 
fresco  picture,  which  he  publicly  exhibited  in  his 
brother  James's  shop-window,  at  the  corner  of  Broad 
Street,  accompanied  with  an  address  to  the  public, 
stating  what  he  considered  to  be  improper  conduct. 
2A 


370  WILLIAM  BLAKE 

So  much  on  the  side  of  Blake.1  On  the  part  of 
Stothard,  the  story  runs  thus.  Mr.  Cromek  had 
agreed  with  that  artist  to  employ  him  upon  a 
picture  of  the  Procession  of  Chaucer's  Pilgrimage 
to  Canterbury,  for  which  he  first  agreed  to  pay 
him  sixty  guineas,  but  in  order  to  enable  him  to 
finish  it  in  a  more  exquisite  manner,  promised  him 
forty  more,  with  an  intention  of  engaging  Bromley 
to  engrave  it;  but  in  consequence  of  some  occur- 
rence, his  name  was  withdrawn,  and  Schiavonetti 
was  employed.  During  the  time  Stothard  was 
painting  the  picture,  Blake  called  to  see  it,  and 
appeared  so  delighted  with  it,  that  Stothard,  sin- 
cerely wishing  to  please  an  old  friend  with  whom 
he  had  lived  so  cordially  for  many  years,  and  from 
whose  works  he  always  most  liberally  declared  he 
had  received  much  pleasure  and  edification,  ex- 
pressed a  wish  to  introduce  his  portrait  as  one  of 
the  party,  as  a  mark  of  esteem. 

Mr.  Hoppner,  in  a  letter  to  a  friend,  dated  May 
30,  1807,  says  of  it, 

'  This  intelligent  group  is  rendered  still  more  interesting 

1  In  1809,  Blake  exhibited  sixteen  poetical  and  historical 
inventions,  in  his  brother's  first-floor  in  Broad  Street ;  eleven 
pictures  in  fresco,  professed  to  be  painted  according  to  the 
ancient  method,  and  seven  drawings,  of  which  an  explanatory 
catalogue  was  published,  and  is  perhaps  the  most  curious  of  its 
kind  ever  written.  At  page  7,  the  description  of  his  fresco 
painting  of  Geoffrey  Chaucer's  Pilgrimage  commences.  This 
picture,  which  is  larger  than  the  print,  is  now  in  the  possession 
of  Thomas  Butts,  Esq.,  a  gentleman  friendly  to  Blake,  and 
who  is  in  possession  of  a  considerable  number  of  his  works. 


BIOGRAPHICAL  SKETCH  OF  BLAKE    371 

by  the  charm  of  colouring,  which  though  simple  is  strong, 
and  most  harmoniously  distributed  throughout  the  picture. 
The  landscape  has  a  deep-toned  brightness  that  accords 
most  admirably  with  the  figures;  and  the  painter  has 
ingeniously  contrived  to  give  a  value  to  a  common  scene 
and  very  ordinary  forms,  that  would  hardly  be  found,  by 
unlearned  eyes,  in  the  natural  objects.  He  has  expressed 
too,  with  great  vivacity  and  truth,  the  freshness  of  morn- 
ing, at  that  season  when  Nature  herself  is  most  fresh  and 
blooming — the  Spring ;  and  it  requires  no  great  stretch 
of  fancy  to  imagine  we  perceive  the  influence  of  it  on  the 
cheeks  of  the  Fair  Wife  of  Bath,  and  her  rosy  companions, 
the  Monk  and  Friar. 

'  In  respect  of  the  execution  of  the  various  parts  of  this 
pleasing  design,  it  is  not  too  much  praise  to  say,  that  it 
is  wholly  free  from  that  vice  which  painters  term  manner ; 
and  it  has  this  peculiarity  beside,  which  I  do  not  remem- 
ber to  have  seen  in  any  picture,  ancient  or  modern,  namely, 
that  it  bears  no  mark  of  the  period  in  which  it  was  painted, 
but  might  very  well  pass  for  the  work  of  some  able  artist 
of  the  time  of  Chaucer.  This  effect  is  not,  I  believe,  the 
result  of  any  association  of  ideas  connected  with  the  costume, 
but  appears  in  primitive  simplicity,  and  the  total  absence 
of  all  affectation,  either  of  colouring  or  pencilling. 

'  Having  attempted  to  describe  a  few  of  the  beauties 
of  this  captivating  performance,  it  remains  only  for  me  to 
mention  one  great  defect.  The  picture  is,  notwithstanding 
appearances,  a  modern  one.  But  if  you  can  divest  your- 
self of  the  general  prejudice  that  exists  against  contem- 
porary talents,  you  will  see  a  work  that  would  have  done 
honour  to  any  school,  at  any  period.' l 

In  1810,  Stothard,  to  his  great  surprise,  found 
that  Blake  had  engraved  and  published  a  plate  of 
the  same  size,  in  some  respects  bearing  a  similarity 

1  See  the  'Artist,'  by  Prince  Hoare,  Esq.,  No.  13,  vol.  i.  p.  13. 


372  WILLIAM   BLAKE 

to  his  own.1     Such  are  the  outlines  of  this  con- 
troversy. 

Blake's  ideas  were  often  truly  entertaining,  and 
after  he  had  conveyed  them  to  paper,  his  whimsical 
and  novel  descriptions  frequently  surpassed  his 
delineations ;  for  instance,  that  of  his  picture  of 
the  Transformation  of  the  Flea  to  the  form  of  a 
Man,  is  extremely  curious.  This  personification, 
which  he  denominated  a  Cupper,  or  Blood-sucker, 
is  covered  with  coat  of  armour,  similar  to  the 
case  of  the  flea,  and  is  represented  slowly  pacing 
in  the  night,  with  a  thorn  attached  to  his  right 
hand,  and  a  cup  in  the  other,  as  if  ready  to  puncture 
the  first  person  whose  blood  he  might  fancy,  like 
Satan  prowling  about  to  seek  whom  he  could  devour. 
Blake  said  of  the  flea,  that  were  that  lively  little 
fellow  the  size  of  an  elephant,  he  was  quite  sure, 
from  the  calculations  he  had  made  of  his  wonderful 


1  I  must  do  Mr.  Stothard  the  justice  to  declare,  that  the 
very  first  time  I  saw  him  after  he  had  read  the  announcement 
of  Blake's  death,  he  spoke  in  the  handsomest  terms  of  his 
talents,  and  informed  me  that  Blake  made  a  remarkably  correct 
and  fine  drawing  of  the  head  of  Queen  Philippa,  from  her  monu- 
mental effigy  in  Westminster  Abbey,  for  Gough's  Sepulchral 
Monuments,  engraved  by  Basire.  The  collectors  of  Stothard's 
numerous  and  elegant  designs  will  recollect  the  name  of  Blake 
as  the  engraver  of  several  plates  in  the  Novelist's  Magazine, 
the  Poetical  Magazine,  and  also  others  for  a  work  entitled  the 
Wit's  Magazine,  from  drawings  produced  by  the  same  artist. 
Trotter,  the  engraver,  who  received  instructions  from  Blake, 
and  who  was  a  pattern-draughtsman  to  the  calico-printers, 
introduced  his  friend  Stothard  to  Blake,  and  their  attachment 
for  each  other  coutinued  most  cordially  to  exist  in  the  opinion 
of  the  public,  until  they  produced  their  rival  pictures  of 
Chaucer's  Canterbury  Pilgrimage. 


BIOGRAPHICAL  SKETCH  OF  BLAKE    373 

strength,  that  he  could  bound  from  Dover  to  Calais 
in  one  leap.1  Whatever  may  be  the  public  opinion 
hereafter  of  Blake's  talents,  when  his  enemies  are 
dead,  I  will  not  presume  to  predict ; 2  but  this  I 
am  certain  of,  that  on  the  score  of  industry  at  least, 
many  artists  must  strike  to  him.  Application  was 
a  faculty  so  engendered  in  him  that  he  took  little 
bodily  exercise  to  keep  up  his  health :  he  had  few 
evening  walks  and  little  rest  from  labour,  for  his 
mind  was  ever  fixed  upon  his  art,  nor  did  he  at 
any  time  indulge  in  a  game  of  chess,  draughts,  or 
backgammon ;  such  amusements,  considered  as 
relaxations  by  artists  in  general,  being  to  him 
distractions.  His  greatest  pleasure  was  derived 
from  the  Bible — a  work  ever  at  his  hand,  and 
which  he  often  assiduously  consulted  in  several 
languages.  Had  he  fortunately  lived  till  the  next 
year's  exhibition  at  Somerset  House,  the  public 
would  then  have  been  astonished  at  his  exquisite 

1  This  interesting  little  picture  is  painted  in  fresco.     It  is 
now  the  property  of  John  Varley,  the  artist,  whose  landscapes 
will  ever  be  esteemed  as  some  of  the  finest  productions  in  Art, 
and  who  may  fairly  be  considered  as  one  of  the  founders  of  the 
Society  of  Artists  in  Water-Colours ;  the  annual  exhibitions 
of  which  continue  to  surpass  those  of  the  preceding  seasons. 

2  Blake's  talent  is  not  to  be  seen  in  his  engravings  from  the 
designs  of  other  artists,  though  he  certainly  honestly  endea- 
voured to  copy  the  beauties  of  Stothard,  Flaxman,  and  those 
masters  set  before  him  by  the  few  publishers  who  employed 
him  ;  but  his  own  engravings  from  his  own  mind  are  the  pro- 
ductions which  the  man  of  true  feeling  must  ever  admire,  and 
the  predictions  of  Fuseli  and  Flaxman  may  hereafter  be  verified 
— '  That  a  time  will  come  when  Blake's  finest  works  will  be  as 
much  sought  after  and  treasured  up  in  the  portfolios  of  men 
of  mind,  as  those  of  Michel  Angelo  are  at  present.' 


374  WILLIAM  BLAKE 

finishing  of  a  Fresco  picture  of  the  Last  Judgment, 
containing  upwards  of  one  thousand  figures,  many 
of  them  wonderfully  conceived  and  grandly  drawn. 
The  lights  of  this  extraordinary  performance  have 
the  appearance  of  silver  and  gold  ;  but  upon  Mrs. 
Blake's  assuring  me  that  there  was  no  silver  used, 
I  found,  upon  a  closer  examination,  that  a  blue 
wash  had  been  passed  over  those  parts  of  the 
gilding  which  receded,  and  the  lights  of  the  forward 
objects,  which  were  also  of  gold,  were  heightened 
with  a  warm  colour,  to  give  the  appearance  of  the 
two  metals. 

It  is  most  certain,  that  the  uninitiated  eye  was 
incapable  of  selecting  the  beauties  of  Blake ;  his 
effusions  were  not  generally  felt ;  and  in  this 
opinion  I  am  borne  out  in  the  frequent  assertions 
of  Fuseli  and  Flaxman.  It  would,  therefore,  be 
unreasonable  to  expect  the  booksellers  to  embark 
in  publications  not  likely  to  meet  remuneration. 
Circumstanced,  then,  as  Blake  was,  approaching  to 
threescore  years  and  ten,  in  what  way  was  he  to 
persevere  in  his  labours  ?  Alas,  he  knew  not ! 
until  the  liberality  of  Mr.  Linnell,  a  brother-artist 
of  eminence,  whose  discernment  could  well  appre- 
ciate those  parts  of  his  designs  which  deserved 
perpetuity,  enabled  him  to  proceed  and  execute  in 
comfort  a  series  of  twenty-one  plates,  illustrative 
of  the  Book  of  Job.  This  was  the  last  work  he 
completed,  upon  the  merits  of  which  he  received 
the  highest  congratulations  from  the  following  Royal 


BIOGRAPHICAL  SKETCH  OF  BLAKE    375 

Academicians:  Sir  Thomas  Lawrence,  Mr.  Baily, 
Mr.  Philips,  Mr.  Chantrey,  Mr.  James  Ward,  Mr. 
Arnald,  Mr.  Collins,  Mr.  Westmacott,  and  many 
other  artists  of  eminence. 

As  to  Blake's  system  of  colouring,  which  I  have 
not  hitherto  noticed,  it  was  in  many  instances  most 
beautifully  prismatic.  In  this  branch  of  the  art 
he  often  acknowledged  Apelles  to  have  been  his 
tutor,  who  was,  he  said,  so  much  pleased  with  his 
style,  that  once  when  he  appeared  before  him, 
among  many  of  his  observations,  he  delivered  the 
following : — '  You  certainly  possess  my  system  of 
colouring ;  and  I  now  wish  you  to  draw  my  person, 
which  has  hitherto  been  untruly  delineated.' 

I  must  own  that  until  I  was  favoured  by  Mr. 
Upcott  with  a  sight  of  some  of  Blake's  works, 
several  of  which  I  had  never  seen,  I  was  not  so 
fully  aware  of  his  great  depth  of  knowledge  in 
colouring.  Of  these  most  interesting  specimens 
of  his  art,  which  are  now  extremely  rare,  and 
rendered  invaluable  by  his  death,  as  it  is  impossible 
for  any  one  to  colour  them  with  his  mind,  should 
the  plates  remain,  Mr.  Richard  Thomson,  another 
truly  kind  friend,  has  favoured  me  with  the  follow- 
ing descriptive  lists. 

SONGS  OF  EXPERIENCE.  The  author  and  printer,  W. 
Blake.  Small  octavo ;  seventeen  plates,  including  the 
title-page.  Frontispiece,  a  winged  infant  mounted  on  the 
shoulders  of  a  youth.  On  the  title-page,  two  figures 
weeping  over  two  crosses. 


376  WILLIAM  BLAKE 

Introduction.  Four  Stanzas  on  a  cloud,  with  a  night- 
sky  behind,  and  beneath,  a  figure  of  Earth  stretched  on 
a  mantle. 

Earth's  Answer.  Five  Stanzas ;  a  serpent  on  the  ground 
beneath. 

The  Clod  and  the  Pebble.  Three  Stanzas;  above,  a 
headpiece  of  four  sheep  and  two  oxen ;  beneath,  a  duck 
and  reptiles. 

A  Poison  Tree.  Four  Stanzas.  The  tree  stretches  up 
the  right  side  of  the  page ;  and  beneath,  a  dead  body 
killed  by  its  influence. 

The  Fly.  Five  Stanzas.  Beneath,  a  female  figure 
with  two  children. 

Holy  Thursday.  Four  Stanzas.  Head-piece,  a  female 
figure  discovering  a  dead  child.  On  the  right-hand  margin 
a  mother  and  two  children  lamenting  the  loss  of  an  infant 
which  lies  beneath.  Perhaps  this  is  one  of  the  most 
tasteful  of  the  set. 

The  Chimney-Sweeper.  Three  Stanzas.  Beneath,  a 
figure  of  one  walking  in  snow  towards  an  open  door. 

London.  Four  Stanzas.  Above,  a  child  leading  an 
old  man  through  the  street ;  on  the  right  hand,  a  figure 
warming  itself  at  a  fire.  If  in  any  instance  Mr.  Blake 
has  copied  himself,  it  is  in  the  figure  of  the  old  man  upon 
this  plate,  whose  position  appears  to  have  been  a  favourite 
one  with  him. 

The  Tiger.  Six  Stanzas.  On  the  right-hand  margin, 
the  trunk  of  a  tree ;  and  beneath,  a  tiger  walking. 

A  Little  Boy  Lost.  Six  Stanzas.  Ivy-leaves  on  the  right 
hand,  and  beneath,  weeping  figure  before  a  fire,  in  which 
the  verses  state  that  the  child  had  been  burned  by  a  Saint. 

The  Human  Abstract.  Six  Stanzas.  The  trunk  of  a 
tree  on  the  right-hand  margin,  and  beneath,  an  old  man 
in  white  drawing  a  veil  over  his  head. 

The  Angel.  Four  Stanzas.  Head-piece,  a  female  figure 
lying  beneath  a  tree,  and  pushing  from  her  a  winged  boy. 

My  Pretty  Rose-Tree.  Two  Stanzas  :  succeeded  by  a 
small  vignette,  of  a  figure  weeping,  and  another  lying 


BIOGRAPHICAL  SKETCH  OF  BLAKE    377 

reclined  at  the  foot  of  a  tree.  Beneath,  are  two  verses 
more,  entitled,  Ah!  Sun-Flower;  and  a  single  stanza, 
headed  The  Lily. 

Nurse's  Song.  Two  Stanzas.  Beneath,  a  girl  with  a 
youth  and  a  female  child  at  a  door  surrounded  by  vine- 
leaves. 

A  Little  Girl  Lost.  Seven  Stanzas ;  interspersed  with 
birds  and  leaves,  the  trunk  of  a  tree  on  the  right-hand 
margin. 

The  whole  of  these  plates  are  coloured  in  imitation  of 
fresco.  The  poetry  of  these  songs  is  wild,  irregular,  and 
highly  mystical,  but  of  no  great  degree  of  elegance  or 
excellence,  and  their  prevailing  feature  is  a  tone  of  com- 
plaint of  the  misery  of  mankind. 

AMERICA  :  a  Prophecy.  Lambeth  :  Printed  by  William 
Blake,  in  the  year  1793  ;  folio  ;  eighteen  plates  or  twenty 
pages,  including  the  frontispiece  and  title-page.  After 
a  Preludium  of  thirty-seven  lines  commences  the  Prophecy 
of  226,  which  are  interspersed  with  numerous  head- 
pieces, vignettes,  and  tail-pieces,  usually  stretching 
along  the  left-hand  margin  and  enclosing  the  text ;  which 
sometimes  appears  written  on  a  cloud,  and  at  others 
environed  by  flames  and  water.  Of  the  latter  subject 
a  very  fine  specimen  is  shown  upon  page  13,  where 
the  tail-piece  represents  the  bottom  of  the  sea,  with 
various  fishes  coming  together  to  prey  upon  a  dead  body. 
The  head-piece  is  another  dead  body  lying  on  the  surface 
of  the  waters,  with  an  eagle  feeding  upon  it  with  out- 
stretched wings.  Another  instance  of  Mr.  Blake's 
favourite  figure  of  the  old  man  entering  at  Death's  door, 
is  contained  on  page  12  of  this  poem.  The  subject  of 
the  text  is  a  conversation  between  the  Angel  of  Albion, 
the  Angels  of  the  Thirteen  States,  Washington,  and  some 
others  of  the  American  generals,  and  '  Red  Ore,'  the  spirit 
of  war  and  evil.  The  verses  are  without  rhyme,  and  most 
resemble  hexameters,  though  they  are  by  no  means  exact ; 
and  the  expressions  are  mystical  in  a  very  high  degree. 

EUROPE  :  a  Prophecy.     Lambeth  :  Printed  by  William 


378  WILLIAM  BLAKE 

Blake,  1794;  folio;  seventeen  plates  on  the  leaves,  in- 
clusive of  the  frontispiece  and  title-page.  Coloured  to 
imitate  the  ancient  fresco  painting.  The  Preludium  con- 
sists of  thirty-three  lines,  in  stanzas  without  rhyme,  and 
the  Prophecy  of  two  hundred  and  eight ;  the  decorations 
to  which  are  larger  than  most  of  those  in  the  former  book, 
and  approach  nearest  to  the  character  of  paintings,  since, 
in  several  instances,  they  occupy  the  whole  page.  The 
frontispiece  is  an  uncommonly  fine  specimen  of  art,  and 
approaches  almost  to  the  sublimity  of  Raffaelle  or  Michel 
Angelo.  It  represents  'The  Ancient  of  Days,'  in  an  orb 
of  light  surrounded  by  dark  clouds,  as  referred  to  in 
Proverbs  viii.  27,  stooping  down  with  an  enormous 
pair  of  compasses  to  describe  the  destined  orb  of  the 
world,1  '  when  he  set  a  compass  upon  the  face  of  the 
earth.' 

'  in  His  hand 

He  took  the  golden  compasses,  prepar'd 
In  God's  eternal  store,  to  circumscribe 
This  universe,  and  all  created  things  : 
One  foot  he  centred,  and  the  other  turn'd 
Round  through  the  vast  profundity  obscure ; 
And  said,  "  Thus  far  extend,  thus  far  thy  bounds, 
This  be  thy  just  circumference,  O  World  !  " ; 

Paradise  Lost,  book  vii.  line  236. 


1  He  was  inspired  with  the  splendid  grandeur  of  this  figure, 
by  the  vision  which  he  declared  hovered  over  his  head  at  the 
top  of  his  staircase  ;  and  he  has  been  frequently  heard  to  say, 
that  it  made  a  more  powerful  impression  upon  his  mind  than 
all  he  had  ever  been  visited  by.  This  subject  was  such  a 
favourite  with  him,  that  he  always  bestowed  more  time  and 
enjoyed  greater  pleasure  when  colouring  the  print,  than  any- 
thing he  ever  produced. 

Mr.  F.  Tatham  employed  him  to  tint  an  impression  of  it,  for 
which  I  have  heard  he  paid  him  the  truly  liberal  sum  of  three 
guineas  and  a  half.  I  say  liberal,  though  the  specimen  is  worth 
any  price,  because  the  sum  was  so  considerably  beyond  what 
Blake  generally  had  been  accustomed  to  receive  as  a  remunera- 


BIOGRAPHICAL  SKETCH  OF  BLAKE    379 

Another  splendid  composition  in  this  work  are  the  two 
angels  pouring  out  the  black-spotted  plague  upon  Eng- 
land, on  page  9  ;  in  which  the  fore-shortening  of  the  legs, 
the  grandeur  of  their  positions,  and  the  harmony  with 
which  they  are  adapted  to  each  other  and  to  their  curved 
trumpets,  are  perfectly  admirable.  The  subject-matter 
of  the  work  is  written  in  the  same  wild  and  singular 
measures  as  the  preceding,  and  describes,  in  mystical 
language,  the  terrors  of  plague  and  anarchy  which  over- 
spread England  during  the  slumbers  of  Enithannon  for 
eighteen  hundred  years ;  upon  whose  awaking,  the  fero- 
cious spirit  Ore  burst  into  flames  '  in  the  vineyards  of  red 
France.'  At  the  end  of  this  poem  are  seven  separate 
engravings  on  folio  pages,  without  letterpress,  which  are 
coloured  like  the  former  part  of  the  work,  with  a  degree 
of  splendour  and  force,  as  almost  to  resemble  sketches  in 
oil-colours.  The  finest  of  these  are  a  figure  of  an  angel 
standing  in  the  sun,  a  group  of  three  furies  surrounded 
by  clouds  and  fire,  and  a  figure  of  a  man  sitting  beneath 
a  tree  in  the  deepest  dejection ;  all  of  which  are  pecu- 
liarly remarkable  for  their  strength  and  splendour  of 
colouring.  Another  publication  by  Mr.  Blake  consisted 
only  of  a  small  quarto  volume  of  twenty -three  engravings 
of  various  shapes  and  sizes,  coloured  as  before,  some  of 
which  are  of  extraordinary  effect  and  beauty.  The  best 

tion  for  his  extraordinary  talents.  Upon  this  truly  inestimable 
impression,  which  I  have  now  before  me,  Blake  worked  when 
bolstered-up  in  his  bed  only  a  few  days  before  he  died  ;  and  my 
friend  F.  Tatham  has  just  informed  me,  that  after  Blake  had 
frequently  touched  upon  it,  and  had  as  frequently  held  it  at  a 
distance,  he  threw  it  from  him,  and  with  an  air  of  exulting 
triumph  exclaimed,  '  There,  that  will  do  !  I  cannot  mend  it.' 
However,  this  was  not  his  last  production ;  for  immediately 
after  he  had  made  the  above  declaration  to  his  beloved  Kate, 
upon  whom  his  eyes  were  steadfastly  fixed,  he  vociferated, 
'  Stay  !  keep  as  you  are  !  you  have  ever  been  an  angel  to  me, 
I  will  draw  you ' ;  and  he  actually  made  a  most  spirited  like- 
ness of  her,  though  within  so  short  a  period  of  his  earthly 
termination. 


380  WILLIAM  BLAKE 

plates  in  this  series  are — the  first  of  an  aged  man,  with 
a  white  beard  sweeping  the  ground,  and  writing  in  a  book 
with  each  hand,  naked ;  a  human  figure  pressing  out  his 
brain  through  his  ears ;  and  the  great  sea-serpent ;  but 
perhaps  the  best  is  a  figure  sinking  in  a  stormy  sea  at 
sunset,  the  splendid  light  of  which,  and  the  foam  upon 
the  black  waves,  are  almost  magical  effects  of  colouring. 
Beneath  the  first  design  is  engraven  '  Lambeth,  printed  by 
W.  Blake,  1794.' 

Blake's  modes  of  preparing  his  ground,  and 
laying  them  over  his  panels  for  painting,  mixing 
his  colours,  and  manner  of  working,  were  those 
which  he  considered  to  have  been  practised  by  the 
earliest  fresco  painters,  whose  productions  still 
remain,  in  numerous  instances,  vivid  and  perman- 
ently fresh.  His  ground  was  a  mixture  of  whiting 
and  carpenter's  glue,  which  he  passed  over  several 
times  in  thin  coatings  :  his  colours  he  ground  him- 
self, and  also  united  them  with  the  same  sort  of 
glue,  but  in  a  much  weaker  state.  He  would,  in 
the  course  of  painting  a  picture,  pass  a  very  thin 
transparent  wash  of  glue-water  over  the  whole  of 
the  parts  he  had  worked  upon,  and  then  proceed 
with  his  finishing.1 

1  Loutherbourgh  was  also,  in  his  way,  very  ingenious  in  big 
contrivances.  To  oblige  his  friend  Garrick,  he  enriched  a  drama, 
entitled  '  The  Christmas  Tale,'  with  scenery  painted  by  himself, 
and  introduced  such  novelty  and  brilliancy  of  effect,  as  formed 
a  new  era  in  that  species  of  art.  This  he  accomplished  by 
means  of  differently  coloured  silks  placed  before  the  lamps  at 
the  front  of  the  stage,  and  by  the  lights  behind  the  side  scenes. 
The  same  effects  were  used  for  distance  and  atmosphere.  As 
for  instance,  Harlequin  in  a  fog  was  produced  by  tiffany  hung 
between  the  audience  and  himself.  Mr.  Seguire,  the  father  of 


BIOGRAPHICAL  SKETCH  OF  BLAKE    381 

This  process  I  have  tried,  and  find,  by  using  my 
mixture  warm,  that  I  can  produce  the  same  texture 
as  possessed  in  Blake  s  pictures  of  the  Last  Judg- 
ment, and  others  of  his  productions,  particularly 
in  Varley's  curious  picture  of  the  personified  Flea. 
Blake  preferred  mixing  his  colours  with  carpenter's 
glue,  to  gum,  on  account  of  the  latter  cracking  in 
the  sun,  and  becoming  humid  in  moist  weather. 
The  glue-mixture  stands  the  sun,  and  change  of 
atmosphere  has  no  effect  upon  it.  Every  carpenter 
knows  that  if  a  broken  piece  of  stick  be  joined 
with  good  glue,  the  stick  will  seldom  break  again 
in  the  glued  parts. 

That  Blake  had  many  secret  modes  of  working, 
both  as  a  colourist  and  an  engraver,  I  have  no 
doubt.  His  method  of  eating  away  the  plain 
copper,  and  leaving  his  drawn  lines  of  his  subjects 
and  his  words  as  stereotype,  is,  in  my  mind,  per- 
fectly original.  Mrs.  Blake  is  in  possession  of  the 
secret,  and  she  ought  to  receive  something  con- 
siderable for  its  communication,  as  I  am  quite 
certain  it  may  be  used  to  the  greatest  advantage 
both  to  artists  and  literary  characters  in  general. 

That  Blake's  coloured  plates  have  more  effect 

the  Keeper  of  the  King's  Pictures,  and  those  of  the  National 
Gallery,  purchased  of  Mr.  Loutherbourgh  ten  small  designs  for 
the  scenery  of  Omiah,  for  which  scenes  the  manager  paid  him 
one  thousand  pounds.  Mr.  Loutherbourgh  never  would  leave 
any  paper  or  designs  at  the  theatre,  nor  would  he  ever  allow 
any  one  to  see  what  he  intended  to  produce ;  as  he  secretly 
held  small  cards  in  his  hand,  which  he  now  and  then  referred 
to  in  order  to  assist  him  in  his  recollections  of  his  small  drawings. 


382  WILLIAM  BLAKE 

than  others  where  gum  has  been  used,  is,  in  my 
opinion,  the  fact,  and  I  shall  rest  my  assertion  upon 
those  beautiful  specimens  in  the  possession  of  Mr. 
Upcott,  coloured  purposely  for  that  gentleman's 
godfather,  Ozias  Humphrey,  Esq.,  to  whom  Blake 
wrote  the  following  interesting  letter. 

TO  OZIAS  HUMPHREY,  ESQ. 

'  THE  design  of  The  Last  Judgment,  which  I  have 
completed  by  your  recommendation  for  the  Countess  of 
Egremont,  it  is  necessary  to  give  some  account  of ;  and 
its  various  parts  ought  to  be  described,  for  the  accom- 
modation of  those  who  give  it  the  honour  of  their 
attention. 

'  Christ  seated  on  the  Throne  of  Judgment :  the 
Heavens  in  clouds  rolling  before  him  and  around  him, 
like  a  scroll  ready  to  be  consumed  in  the  fires  of  the 
Angels;  who  descend  before  his  feet,  with  their  four 
trumpets  sounding  to  the  four  winds. 

'  Beneath,  the  Earth  is  convulsed  with  the  labours  of 
the  Resurrection.  In  the  caverns  of  the  earth  is  the 
Dragon  with  seven  heads  and  ten  horns,  chained  by  two 
Angels ;  and  above  his  cavern,  on  the  earth's  surface,  is 
the  Harlot,  also  seized  and  bound  by  two  Angels  with 
chains,  while  her  palaces  are  falling  into  ruins,  and  her 
counsellors  and  warriors  are  descending  into  the  abyss, 
in  wailing  and  despair. 

'  Hell  opens  beneath  the  harlot's  seat  on  the  left  hand, 
into  which  the  wicked  are  descending. 

'  The  right  hand  of  the  design  is  appropriated  to  the 
Resurrection  of  the  Just :  the  left  hand  of  the  design  is 
appropriated  to  the  Resurrection  and  Fall  of  the  Wicked. 

'  Immediately  before  the  Throne  of  Christ  are  Adam 
and  Eve,  kneeling  in  humiliation,  as  representatives  of 


BIOGRAPHICAL  SKETCH  OF  BLAKE    383 

the  whole  human  race ;  Abraham  and  Moses  kneel  on 
each  side  beneath  them  ;  from  the  cloud  on  which  Eve 
kneels,  and  beneath  Moses,  and  from  the  tables  of  stone 
which  utter  lightning,  is  seen  Satan  wound  round  by  the 
Serpent,  and  falling  headlong ;  the  Pharisees  appear  on 
the  left  hand  pleading  their  own  righteousness  before  the 
Throne  of  Christ :  The  Book  of  Death  is  opened  on  clouds 
by  two  Angels ;  many  groups  of  figures  are  falling  from 
before  the  throne,  and  from  the  sea  of  fire,  which  flows 
before  the  steps  of  the  throne ;  on  which  are  seen  the 
seven  Lamps  of  the  Almighty,  burning  before  the  throne. 
Many  figures  chained  and  bound  together  fall  through  the 
air,  and  some  are  scourged  by  Spirits  with  flames  of  fire 
into  the  abyss  of  Hell,  which  opens  to  receive  them 
beneath,  on  the  left  hand  of  the  harlot's  seat;  where 
others  are  howling  and  descending  into  the  flames,  and 
in  the  act  of  dragging  each  other  into  Hell,  and  of  con- 
tending in  fighting  with  each  other  on  the  brink  of 
perdition. 

'  Before  the  Throne  of  Christ  on  the  right  hand,  the 
Just,  in  humiliation  and  in  exultation,  rise  through  the  air, 
with  their  Children  and  Families ;  some  of  whom  are 
bowing  before  the  Book  of  Life,  which  is  opened  by  two 
Angels  on  clouds :  many  groups  arise  with  exultation ; 
among  them  is  a  figure  crowned  with  stars,  and  the  moon 
beneath  her  feet,  with  six  infants  around  her,  she  repre- 
sents the  Christian  Church.  The  green  hills  appear 
beneath ;  with  the  graves  of  the  blessed,  which  are  seen 
bursting  with  their  births  of  immortality ;  parents  and 
children  embrace  and  arise  together,  and  in  exulting 
attitudes  tell  each  other  that  the  New  Jerusalem  is  ready 
to  descend  upon  earth ;  they  arise  upon  the  air  rejoicing ; 
others  newly  awaked  from  the  graves,  stand  upon  the 
earth  embracing  and  shouting  to  the  Lamb,  who  cometh 
in  the  clouds  with  power  and  great  glory. 

'  The  whole  upper  part  of  the  design  is  a  view  of 
Heaven  opened ;  around  the  Throne  of  Christ,  four  living 


384  WILLIAM  BLAKE 

creatures  filled  with  eyes,  attended  by  seven  angels  with 
seven  vials  of  the  wrath  of  God,  and  above  these  seven 
Angels  with  the  seven  trumpets  compose  the  cloud,  which 
by  its  rolling  away  displays  the  opening  seats  of  the 
Blessed,  on  the  right  and  the  left  of  which  are  seen  the 
four-and-twenty  Elders  seated  on  thrones  to  judge  the 
dead. 

'Behind  the  seat  and  Throne  of  Christ  appears  the 
Tabernacle  with  its  veil  opened,  the  Candlestick  on  the 
right,  the  Table  with  Show-bread  on  the  left,  and  in  the 
midst,  the  Cross  in  place  of  the  Ark,  with  the  two 
Cherubim  bowing  over  it. 

1  On  the  right  hand  of  the  Throne  of  Christ  is  Baptism, 
on  his  left  is  the  Lord's  Supper — the  two  introducers  into 
Eternal  Life.  Women  with  infants  approach  the  figure 
of  an  aged  Apostle,  which  represents  Baptism ;  and  on 
the  left  hand  the  Lord's  Supper  is  administered  by  Angels, 
from  the  hands  of  another  aged  Apostle ;  these  kneel  on 
each  side  of  the  Throne,  which  is  surrounded  by  a  glory : 
in  the  glory  many  infants  appear,  representing  Eternal 
Creation  flowing  from  the  Divine  Humanity  in  Jesus  ; 
who  opens  the  Scroll  of  Judgment  upon  his  knees  before 
the  living  and  the  dead. 

*  Such  is  the  design  which  you,  my  dear  Sir,  have  been 
the  cause  of  my  producing,  and  which,  but  for  you,  might 
have  slept  till  the  Last  Judgment. 

'  WILLIAM  BLAKE. 
'  January  18,  1808.' 

Blake  and  his  wife  were  known  to  have  lived 
so  happily  together,  that  they  might  unquestionably 
have  been  registered  at  Dunmow.  '  Their  hopes 
and  fears  were  to  each  other  known,'  and  their  days 
and  nights  were  passed  in  each  other's  company, 
for  he  always  painted,  drew,  engraved,  and  studied, 


BIOGRAPHICAL  SKETCH  OF  BLAKE    385 

in  the  same  room  where  they  grilled,  boiled,  stewed, 
and  slept;  and  so  steadfastly  attentive  was  he  to 
his  beloved  tasks,  that  for  the  space  of  two  years 
he  had  never  once  been  out  of  his  house ;  and  his 
application  was  often  so  incessant,  that  in  the 
middle  of  the  night,  he  would,  after  thinking 
deeply  upon  a  particular  subject,  leap  from  his  bed 
and  write  for  two  hours  or  more ;  and  for  many 
years  he  made  a  constant  practice  of  lighting  the 
fire,  and  putting  on  the  kettle  for  breakfast  before 
his  Kate  awoke. 

During  his  last  illness,  which  was  occasioned 
by  the  gall  mixing  with  his  blood,  he  was  fre- 
quently bolstered-up  in  his  bed  to  complete  his 
drawings,  for  his  intended  illustration  of  Dante ; 
an  author  so  great  a  favourite  with  him,  that 
though  he  agreed  with  Fuseli  and  Flaxman,  in 
thinking  Carey's  translation  superior  to  all  others, 
yet,  at  the  age  of  sixty-three  years,  he  learned  the 
Italian  language  purposely  to  enjoy  Dante  in  the 
highest  possible  way.  For  this  intended  work,  he 
produced  seven  engraved  plates  of  an  imperial 
quarto  size,  and  nearly  one  hundred  finished  draw- 
ings of  a  size  considerably  larger ;  which  will  do 
equal  justice  to  his  wonderful  mind,  and  the  liberal 
heart  of  their  possessor,  who  engaged  him  upon 
so  delightful  a  task  at  a  time  when  few  persons 
would  venture  to  give  him  employment,  and 
whose  kindness  softened,  for  the  remainder  of 
his  life,  his  lingering  bodily  sufferings,  which 
2B 


386  WILLIAM  BLAKE 

he  was  seen  to  support  with  the  most  Christian 
fortitude. 

On  the  day  of  his  death,  August  12,1  1827,  he 
composed  and  uttered  songs  to  his  Maker  so  sweetly 
to  the  ear  of  his  Catherine,  that  when  she  stood  to 
hear  him,  he,  looking  upon  her  most  affectionately, 
said, '  My  beloved,  they  are  not  mine — no — they 
are  not  mine.'  He  expired  at  six  in  the  evening, 
with  the  most  cheerful  serenity.  Some  short  time 
before  his  death,  Mrs.  Blake  asked  him  where  he 
should  like  to  be  buried,  and  whether  he  would 
have  the  Dissenting  Minister,  or  the  Clergyman  of 
the  Church  of  England,  to  read  the  service:  his 
answers  were,  that  as  far  as  his  own  feelings  were 
concerned,  they  might  bury  him  where  she  pleased, 
adding,  that  as  his  father,  mother,  aunt,  and  brother 
were  buried  in  Buuhill  Eow,  perhaps  it  would  be 
better  to  lie  there,  but  as  to  service,  he  should  wish 
for  that  of  the  Church  of  England. 

His  hearse  was  followed  by  two  mourning- 
coaches,  attended  by  private  friends :  Calvert, 
Kichmond,  Tatham,  and  his  brother,  promising 
young  artists,  to  whom  he  had  given  instructions 
in  the  Arts,  were  of  the  number.  Tatham,  ill  as 
he  was,  travelled  ninety  miles  to  attend  the  funeral 
of  one  for  whom,  next  to  his  own  family,  he  held 
the  highest  esteem.  Blake  died  in  his  sixty-ninth 
year,  in  the  back-room  of  the  first-floor  of  No.  3 

1  Not  the  13th,  as  has  been  stated  by  several  editors  who 
have  noticed  his  death. 


BIOGRAPHICAL  SKETCH  OF  BLAKE    387 

Fountain  Court,  Strand,  and  was  buried  in  Bunhill 
Fields,  on  the  17th  of  August,  at  the  distance  of 
about  twenty-five  feet  from  the  north  wall,  numbered 
eighty. 

Limited  as  Blake  was  in  his  pecuniary  circum- 
stances, his  beloved  Kate  survives  him  clear  of 
even  a  sixpenny  debt;  and  in  the  fullest  belief 
that  the  remainder  of  her  days  will  be  rendered 
tolerable  by  the  sale  of  the  few  copies  of  her  hus- 
band's works,  which  she  will  dispose  of  at  the 
original  price  of  publication;  in  order  to  enable 
the  collector  to  add  to  the  weight  of  his  book- 
shelves, without  being  solicited  to  purchase,  out  of 
compassion,  those  specimens  of  her  husband's  talents 
which  they  ought  to  possess. 

EXTRACT  FROM  'A  BOOK  FOR  A  EAINY  DAY' 

[1784]. — This  year  Mr.  Flaxman,  who  then  lived 
in  Wardour  Street,  introduced  me  to  one  of  his 
early  patrons,  the  Eev.  Henry  Mathew,  of  Percy 
Chapel,  Charlotte  Street,  which  was  built  for  him ; 
he  was  also  afternoon  preacher  at  Saint  Martin 'a- 
in-the-Fields.  At  that  gentleman's  house,  in  Rath- 
bone  Place,  I  became  acquainted  with  Mrs.  Mathew 
and  her  son.  At  that  lady's  most  agreeable  con- 
versaziones I  first  met  the  late  William  Blake,  the 
artist,  to  whom  she  and  Mr.  Flaxman  had  been 
truly  kind.  There  I  have  often  heard  him  read 
and  sing  several  of  his  poems.  He  was  listened 


388  WILLIAM   BLAKE 

to  by  the  company  with  profound  silence,  and 
allowed  by  most  of  the  visitors  to  possess  original 
and  extraordinary  merit.'1 

1  A  time  will  come  when  the  numerous,  though  now  very 
rare  works  of  Blake  (in  consequence  of  his  taking  very  few 
impressions  from  the  plates  before  they  were  rubbed  out  to 
enable  him  to  use  them  for  other  subjects),  will  be  sought  after 
with  the  most  intense  avidity.  He  was  considered  by  Stothard 
and  Flaxman  (and  will  be  by  those  of  congenial  minds,  if  we 
can  reasonably  expect  such  again)  with  their  highest  admiration. 
These  artists  allowed  him  their  utmost  unqualified  praise,  and 
were  ever  anxious  to  recommend  him  and  his  productions  to 
the  patrons  of  the  Arts ;  but,  alas  !  they  were  not  sufficiently 
appreciated  as  to  enable  Blake,  as  every  one  could  wish,  to  pro- 
vide an  independence  for  his  surviving  partner,  Kate,  who 
adored  his  memory. 


(VIII.)  LIFE  OF  BLAKE 
BY  ALLAN  CUNNINGHAM.     1830 


[ALLAN  CUNNINGHAM'S  Life  of  Blake  occupies  pp.  142-179  of 
the  second  volume  of  his  Lives  of  the  most  eminent  British 
Painters,  Sculptors,  and  Architects.  (London  :  John  Murray, 
Albemarle  Street,  MDCCCXXX.)  It  is  largely  indebted  to  Smith, 
but  contains  a  few  anecdotes  not  found  elsewhere,  and  probably 
derived  from  Varley  and  Linnell.  In  a  letter  to  Liimell, 
printed  in  Mr.  Story's  Life,  Cunningham  says  that  'much 
valuable  information  '  has  been  received  from  Varley,  and  asks 
for  more,  adding,  with  characteristic  impertinence  :  '  I  know 
Blake's  character,  for  I  knew  the  man.  I  shall  make  a,  judicious 
use  of  my  materials,  and  be  merciful  where  sympathy  is  needed. ' 
He  reproduces  the  Phillips  portrait  of  Blake,  which  had  been 
engraved  by  Schiavonetti  for  Blair's  Grave,  in  a  less  showy 
and  more  lifelike  engraving  by  W.  C.  Edwards.] 


WILLIAM  BLAKE 

PAINTING,  like  poetry,  has  followers,  the  body  of 
whose  genius  is  light  compared  to  the  length  of  its 
wings,  and  who,  rising  above  the  ordinary  sympa- 
thies of  our  nature,  are,  like  Napoleon,  betrayed 
by  a  star  which  no  eye  can  see  save  their  own. 
To  this  rare  class  belonged  William  Blake. 

He  was  the  second  son  of  James  Blake  and 
Catherine  his  wife,  and  born  on  the  28th  of 
November,  1757,  in  28  Broad  Street,  Carnaby 
Market,  London.  His  father,  a  respectable  hosier, 
caused  him  to  be  educated  for  his  own  business, 
but  the  love  of  art  came  early  upon  the  boy; 
he  neglected  the  figures  of  arithmetic  for  those  of 
Eaphael  and  Eeynolds ;  and  his  worthy  parents  often 
wondered  how  a  child  of  theirs  should  have  con- 
ceived a  love  for  such  unsubstantial  vanities.  The 
boy,  it  seems,  was  privately  encouraged  by  his 
mother.  The  love  of  designing  and  sketching  grew 
upon  him,  and  he  desired  anxiously  to  be  an  artist. 
His  father  began  to  be  pleased  with  the  notice 
which  his  son  obtained — and  to  fancy  that  a  painter's 
study  might  after  all  be  a  fitter  place  than  a  hosier's 
shop  for  one  who  drew  designs  on  the  backs  of  all 
the  shop  bills,  and  made  sketches  on  the  counter. 

391 


392  WILLIAM  BLAKE 

He  consulted  an  eminent  artist,  who  asked  so  large 
a  sum  for  instruction,  that  the  prudent  shopkeeper 
hesitated,  and  young  Blake  declared  he  would  prefer 
being  an  engraver — a  profession  which  would  bring 
bread  at  least,  and  through  which  he  would  be  con- 
nected with  painting.  It  was  indeed  time  to  dispose 
of  him.  In  addition  to  his  attachment  to  art,  he  had 
displayed  poetic  symptoms — scraps  of  paper  and 
the  blank  leaves  of  books  were  found  covered  with 
groups  and  stanzas.  When  his  father  saw  sketches 
at  the  top  of  the  sheet  and  verses  at  the  bottom,  he 
took  him  away  to  Basire,  the  engraver,  in  Green 
Street,  Lincoln's  Inn  Fields,  and  bound  him  ap- 
prentice for  seven  years.  He  was  then  fourteen 
years  old. 

It  is  told  of  Blake  that  at  ten  years  of  age  he 
became  an  artist,  and  at  twelve  a  poet.  Of  his 
boyish  pencillings  I  can  find  no  traces — but  of  his 
early  intercourse  with  the  Muse  the  proof  lies 
before  me  in  seventy  pages  of  verse,  written,  he 
says,  between  his  twelfth  and  his  twentieth  year, 
and  published,  by  the  advice  of  friends,  when  he 
was  thirty.  There  are  songs,  ballads,  and  a  dra- 
matic poem ;  rude  sometimes  and  melodious, 
but  full  of  fine  thought  and  deep  and  peculiar 
feeling.  To  those  who  love  poetry  for  the  music 
of  its  bells,  these  seventy  pages  will  sound  harsh 
and  dissonant ;  but  by  others  they  will  be  more 
kindly  looked  upon.  John  Flaxman,  a  judge  in  all 
things  of  a  poetic  nature,  was  so  touched  with 


LIFE  OF  BLAKE  393 

many  passages,  that  he  not  only  counselled  their 
publication,  but  joined  with  a  gentleman  of  the 
name  of  Matthews  in  the  expense,  and  presented 
the  printed  sheets  to  the  artist  to  dispose  of  for 
his  own  advantage.  One  of  these  productions  is 
an  address  to  the  Muses — a  common  theme,  but 
sung  in  no  common  manner. 

'  Whether  on  Ida's  shady  brow, 

Or  in  the  chambers  of  the  east, 
The  chambers  of  the  sun,  that  now 
From  ancient  melody  have  ceas'd ; 

Whether  in  heaven  ye  wander  fair, 
Or  the  green  corners  of  the  earth, 

Or  the  blue  regions  of  the  air, 

Where  the  melodious  winds  have  birth ; 

Whether  on  crystal  rocks  ye  rove, 

Beneath  the  bosom  of  the  sea, 
Wandering  in  many  a  coral  grove, 

Fair  Nine  !  forsaking  poesie  ; 

How  have  ye  left  the  ancient  love, 
That  Bards  of  old  enjoyed  in  you ; — 

The  languid  strings  now  scarcely  move, 
The  sound  is  forced — the  notes  are  few.' 

The  little  poem  called  '  The  Tiger '  has  been 
admired  for  the  force  and  vigour  of  its  thoughts 
by  poets  of  high  name.  Many  could  weave  smoother 
lines — few  could  stamp  such  living  images. 

'  Tiger  !  Tiger  !  burning  bright 
In  the  forest  of  the  night, 
What  immortal  hand  or  eye 
Framed  thy  fearful  symmetry  1 


394  WILLIAM  BLAKE 

In  what  distant  deeps  or  skies 
Burned  the  fervour  of  thine  eyes  ? 
On  what  wings  dare  he  aspire — 
What  the  hand  dare  seize  the  fire  ? 

And  what  shoulder  and  what  art 
Could  twist  the  sinews  of  thy  heart  1 
When  thy  heart  began  to  beat, 
What  dread  hand  formed  thy  dread  feet  ? 

What  the  hammer  !  what  the  chain  ! 
Formed  thy  strength  and  forged  thy  brain  1 
What  the  anvil !     What  dread  grasp 
Dared  thy  deadly  terrors  clasp  ? 

When  the  stars  threw  down  their  spheres, 
And  sprinkled  heaven  with  shining  tears, 
Did  he  smile,  his  work  to  see  1 
Did  he  who  made  the  lamb  make  thee  ? ' 

In  the  dramatic  poem  of  King  Edward  the  Third 
there  are  many  nervous  lines,  and  even  whole  pas- 
sages of  high  merit.  The  structure  of  the  verse 
is  often  defective,  and  the  arrangement  inharmo- 
nious ;  but  before  the  ear  is  thoroughly  offended, 
it  is  soothed  by  some  touch  of  deep  melody  and 
poetic  thought.  The  princes  and  earls  of  England 
are  conferring  together  on  the  eve  of  the  battle  of 
Cressy — the  Black  Prince  takes  Chandos  aside, 
and  says — 

'  Now  we  're  alone,  John  Chandos,  I  '11  unburthen 
And  breathe  my  hopes  into  the  burning  air — 
Where  thousand  Deaths  are  posting  up  and  down, 
Commissioned  to  this  fatal  field  of  Cressy  : 
Methinks  I  see  them  arm  my  gallant  soldiers, 


LIFE  OF  BLAKE  395 

And  gird  the  sword  upon  each  thigh,  and  fit 
The  shining  helm,  and  string  each  stubborn  bow, 
And  dancing  to  the  neighing  of  the  steeds  ; — 
Methinks  the  shout  begins — the  battle  burns ; — 
Methinks  I  see  them  perch  on  English  crests, 
And  breathe  the  wild  flame  of  fierce  war  upon 
The  thronged  enemy.' 

In  the  same  high  poetic  spirit  Sir  Walter  Manny 
converses  with  a  genuine  old  English  warrior,  Sir 
Thomas  Dagworth. 

'  O,  Dagworth  ! — France  is  sick  ! — the  very  sky, 
Though  sunshine  light,  it  seems  to  me  as  pale 
As  is  the  fainting  man  on  his  death-bed, 
Whose  face  is  shown  by  light  of  one  weak  taper — 
It  makes  me  sad  and  sick  unto  the  heart ; 
Thousands  must  fall  to-day.' 

Sir  Thomas  answers. 

'  Thousands  of  souls  must  leave  this  prison-house 
To  be  exalted  to  those  heavenly  fields 
Where  songs  of  triumph,  psalms  of  victory, 
Where  peace,  and  joy,  and  love,  and  calm  content 
Sit  singing  on  the  azure  clouds,  and  strew 
The  flowers  of  heaven  upon  the  banquet  table. 
Bind  ardent  hope  upon  your  feet,  like  shoes, 
And  put  the  robe  of  preparation  on. 
The  table,  it  is  spread  in  shining  heaven. 
Let  those  who  fight,  fight  in  good  steadfastness ; 
And  those  who  fall  shall  rise  in  victory.' 

I  might  transcribe  from  these  modest  and  un- 
noticed pages  many  such  passages.  It  would  be 
unfair  not  to  mention  that  the  same  volume  con- 
tains some  wild  and  incoherent  prose,  in  which 


396  WILLIAM   BLAKE 

we  may  trace  more  than  the  dawning  of  those 
strange,  mystical,  and  mysterious  fancies  on  which 
he  subsequently  misemployed  his  pencil.  There 
is  much  that  is  weak,  and  something  that  is  strong, 
and  a  great  deal  that  is  wild  and  mad,  and  all  so 
strangely  mingled,  that  no  meaning  can  be  as- 
signed to  it ;  it  seems  like  a  lamentation  over  the 
disasters  which  came  on  England  during  the  reign 
of  King  John. 

Though  Blake  lost  himself  a  little  in  the  en- 
chanted region  of  song,  he  seems  not  to  have  neg- 
lected to  make  himself  master  of  the  graver,  or  to 
have  forgotten  his  love  of  designs  and  sketches. 
He  was  a  dutiful  servant  to  Basire,  and  he  studied 
occasionally  under  Flaxman  and  Fuseli ;  but  it  was 
his  chief  delight  to  retire  to  the  solitude  of  his 
chamber,  and  there  make  drawings,  and  illustrate 
these  with  verses,  to  be  hung  up  together  in  his 
mother's  chamber.  He  was  always  at  work ;  he 
called  amusement  idleness,  sight-seeing  vanity, 
and  money-making  the  ruin  of  all  high  aspir- 
ations. '  Were  I  to  love  money,'  he  said,  '  I 
should  lose  all  power  of  thought !  desire  of  gain 
deadens  the  genius  of  man.  I  might  roll  in  wealth 
and  ride  in  a  golden  chariot,  were  I  to  listen  to  the 
voice  of  parsimony.  My  business  is  not  to  gather 
gold,  but  to  make  glorious  shapes,  expressing  god- 
like sentiments.'  The  day  was  given  to  the  graver, 
by  which  he  earned  enough  to  maintain  himself 
respectably;  and  he  bestowed  his  evenings  upon 


397 

painting  and  poetry,  and  intertwined  these  so 
closely  in  his  compositions,  that  they  cannot  well 
be  separated. 

When  he  was  six-and-twenty  years  old,  he  mar- 
ried Katharine  Boutcher,  a  young  woman  of  hum- 
ble connections — the  dark- eyed  Kate  of  several  of 
his  lyric  poems.  She  lived  near  his  father's  house 
and  was  noticed  by  Blake  for  the  whiteness  of  her 
hand,  the  brightness  of  her  eyes,  and  a  slim  and 
handsome  shape,  corresponding  with  his  own  no- 
tions of  sylphs  and  naiads.  As  he  was  an  original 
in  all  things,  it  would  have  been  out  of  character 
to  fall  in  love  like  an  ordinary  mortal ;  he  was 
describing  one  evening  in  company  the  pains  he 
had  suffered  from  some  capricious  lady  or  another, 
when  Katharine  Boutcher  said,  '  I  pity  you  from 
my  heart.'  '  Do  you  pity  me  ? '  said  Blake,  '  then 
I  love  you  for  that.'  '  And  I  love  you,'  said  the 
frank-hearted  lass,  and  so  the  courtship  began. 
He  tried  how  well  she  looked  in  a  drawing,  then 
how  her  charms  became  verse ;  and  finding  more- 
over that  she  had  good  domestic  qualities,  he 
married  her.  They  lived  together  long  and 
happily. 

She  seemed  to  have  been  created  on  purpose  for 
Blake : — she  believed  him  to  be  the  finest  genius 
on  earth ;  she  believed  in  his  verse — she  believed 
in  his  designs ;  and  to  the  wildest  flights  of  his 
imagination  she  bowed  the  knee,  and  was  a  wor- 
shipper. She  set  his  house  in  good  order,  prepared 


398  WILLIAM  BLAKE 

his  frugal  meal,  learned  to  think  as  he  thought, 
and,  indulging  him  in  his  harmless  absurdities, 
became,  as  it  were,  bone  of  his  bone,  and  flesh  of 
his  flesh.  She  learned — what  a  young  and  hand- 
some woman  is  seldom  apt  to  learn — to  despise 
gaudy  dresses,  costly  meals,  pleasant  company, 
and  agreeable  invitations — she  found  out  the  way 
of  being  happy  at  home,  living  on  the  simplest  of 
food,  and  contented  in  the  homeliest  of  clothing. 
It  was  no  ordinary  mind  which  could  do  all  this  ; 
and  she  whom  Blake  emphatically  called  his  '  be- 
loved,' was  no  ordinary  woman.  She  wrought  off 
in  the  press  the  impressions  of  his  plates — she 
coloured  them  with  a  light  and  neat  hand — made 
drawings  much  in  the  spirit  of  her  husband's  com- 
positions, and  almost  rivalled  him  in  all  things  save 
in  the  power  which  he  possessed  of  seeing  visions 
of  any  individual  living  or  dead,  whenever  he  chose 
to  see  them. 

His  marriage,  I  have  heard,  was  not  agreeable 
to  his  father ;  and  he  then  left  his  roof  and  resided 
with  his  wife  in  Green  Street,  Leicester  Fields. 
He  returned  to  Broad  Street,  on  the  death  of  his 
father,  a  devout  man,  and  an  honest  shopkeeper, 
of  fifty  years'  standing,  took  a  first-floor  and  a 
shop,  and  in  company  with  one  Parker,  who  had 
been  his  fellow-apprentice,  commenced  printseller. 
His  wife  attended  to  the  business,  and  Blake  con- 
tinued to  engrave,  and  took  Eobert,  his  favourite 
brother,  for  a  pupil.  This  speculation  did  not 


LIFE  OF  BLAKE  399 

succeed — his  brother  too  sickened  and  died;  he 
had  a  dispute  with  Parker — the  shop  was  extin- 
guished, and  he  removed  to  28  Poland  Street. 
Here  he  commenced  that  series  of  works  which 
give  him  a  right  to  be  numbered  among  the  men 
of  genius  of  his  country.  In  sketching  designs, 
engraving  plates,  writing  songs,  and  composing 
music,  he  employed  his  time,  with  his  wife  sitting 
at  his  side,  encouraging  him  in  all  his  undertakings. 
As  he  drew  the  figure  he  meditated  the  song  which 
was  to  accompany  it,  and  the  music  to  which  the 
verse  was  to  be  sung,  was  the  offspring  too  of  the 
same  moment.  Of  his  music  there  are  no  speci- 
mens— he  wanted  the  art  of  noting  it  down — if  it 
equalled  many  of  his  drawings,  and  some  of  his 
songs,  we  have  lost  melodies  of  real  value. 

The  first  fruits  were  the  '  Songs  of  Innocence 
and  Experience,'  a  work  original  and  natural,  and 
of  high  merit,  both  in  poetry  and  in  painting.  It 
consists  of  some  sixty-five  or  seventy  scenes,  pre- 
senting images  of  youth  and  manhood — of  domes- 
tic sadness,  and  fireside  joy — of  the  gaiety  and 
innocence,  and  happiness  of  childhood.  Every  scene 
has  its  poetical  accompaniment,  curiously  inter- 
woven with  the  group  or  the  landscape,  and 
forming,  from  the  beauty  of  the  colour  and  the 
prettiness  of  the  pencilling,  a  very  fair  picture  of 
itself.  Those  designs  are  in  general  highly  poetical ; 
more  allied,  however,  to  heaven  than  to  earth, — a 
kind  of  spiritual  abstractions,  and  indicating  a 


400  WILLIAM  BLAKE 

better  world  and  fuller  happiness  than  mortals 
enjoy.  The  picture  of  Innocence  is  introduced  with 
the  following  sweet  verses. 

'  Piping  down  the  valleys  wild, 

Piping  songs  of  pleasant  glee, 
On  a  cloud  I  saw  a  child, 

And  he  laughing  said  to  me — 

Pipe  a  song  about  a  lamb ; 

So  I  piped  with  merry  cheer. 
Piper,  pipe  that  song  again — 

So  I  piped — he  wept  to  hear. 

Drop  thy  pipe,  thy  happy  pipe, 
Sing  thy  songs  of  happy  cheer — 

So  I  sung  the  same  again, 

While  he  wept  with  joy  to  hear. 

Piper,  sit  thee  down  and  write 

In  a  book  that  all  may  read — 
So  he  vanished  from  my  sight : 

And  I  plucked  a  hollow  reed, 

And  I  made  a  rural  pen, 

And  I  stained  the  water  clear, 
And  I  wrote  my  happy  songs, 

Every  child  may  joy  to  hear.' 

In  a  higher  and  better  spirit  he  wrought  with 
his  pencil.  But  then  he  imagined  himself  under 
spiritual  influences  ;  he  saw  the  forms  and  listened 
to  the  voices  of  the  worthies  of  other  days ;  the 
past  and  the  future  were  before  him,  and  he  heard, 
in  imagination,  even  that  awful  voice  which  called 
on  Adam  amongst  the  trees  of  the  garden.  In  this 
kind  of  dreaming  abstraction,  he  lived  much  of  his 


LIFE   OF  BLAKE  401 

life  ;  all  his  works  are  stamped  with  it ;  and  though 
they  owe  much  of  their  mysticism  and  obscurity  to 
the  circumstance,  there  can  be  no  doubt  that  they 
also  owe  to  it  much  of  their  singular  loveliness 
and  beauty.  It  was  wonderful  that  he  could  thus, 
month  after  month,  and  year  after  year,  lay  down 
his  graver  after  it  had  won  him  his  daily  wages, 
and  retire  from  the  battle  for  bread,  to  disport  his 
fancy  amid  scenes  of  more  than  earthly  splendour, 
and  creatures  pure  as  unfallen  dew. 

In  this  lay  the  weakness  and  the  strength  of 
Blake,  and  those  who  desire  to  feel  the  character 
of  his  compositions,  must  be  familiar  with  his 
history  and  the  peculiarities  of  his  mind.  He  was 
by  nature  a  poet,  a  dreamer,  and  an  enthusiast. 
The  eminence  which  it  had  been  the  first  ambition 
of  his  youth  to  climb,  was  visible  before  him,  and 
he  saw  on  its  ascent  or  on  its  summit  those  who 
had  started  earlier  in  the  race  of  fame.  He  felt 
conscious  of  his  own  merit,  but  was  not  aware  of 
the  thousand  obstacles  which  were  ready  to  inter- 
pose. He  thought  that  he  had  but  to  sing  songs 
and  draw  designs,  and  become  great  and  famous. 
The  crosses  which  genius  is  heir  to  had  been 
wholly  unforeseen — and  they  befell  him  early ;  he 
wanted  the  skill  of  hand,  and  fine  tact  of  fancy  and 
taste,  to  impress  upon  the  offspring  of  his  thoughts 
that  popular  shape,  which  gives  such  productions 
immediate  circulation.  His  works  were  looked 
coldly  on  by  the  world,  and  were  only  esteemed  by 
2c 


402  WILLIAM  BLAKE 

men  of  poetic  minds,  or  those  who  were  fond  of 
things  out  of  the  common  way.  He  earned  a  little 
fame,  but  no  money  by  these  speculations,  and  had 
to  depend  for  bread  on  the  labours  of  the  graver. 

All  this  neither  crushed  his  spirit,  nor  induced 
him  to  work  more  in  the  way  of  the  world  ;  but  it 
had  a  visible  influence  upon  his  mind.  He  be- 
came more  seriously  thoughtful,  avoided  the  com- 
pany of  men,  and  lived  in  the  manner  of  a  hermit, 
in  that  vast  wilderness,  London.  Necessity  made 
him  frugal,  and  honesty  and  independence  pre- 
scribed plain  clothes,  homely  fare,  and  a  cheap 
habitation.  He  was  thus  compelled  more  than  ever 
to  retire  to  worlds  of  his  own  creating,  and  seek 
solace  in  visions  of  paradise  for  the  joys  which 
the  earth  denied  him.  By  frequent  indulgence  in 
these  imaginings,  he  gradually  began  to  believe  in 
the  reality  of  what  dreaming  fancy  painted — the 
pictured  forms  which  swarmed  before  his  eyes, 
assumed,  in  his  apprehension,  the  stability  of  posi- 
tive revelations,  and  he  mistook  the  vivid  figures, 
which  his  professional  imagination  shaped,  for  the 
poets,  and  heroes,  and  princes  of  old.  Amongst  his 
friends,  he  at  length  ventured  to  intimate  that  the 
designs  on  which  he  was  engaged  were  not  from 
his  own  mind,  but  copied  from  grand  works  revealed 
to  him  in  visions  ;  and  those  who  believed  that, 
would  readily  lend  an  ear  to  the  assurance  that  he 
was  commanded  to  execute  his  performances  by  a 
celestial  tongue  ! 


LIFE  OF  BLAKE  403 

Of  these  imaginary  visitations  he  made  good  use, 
when  he  invented  his  truly  original  and  beautiful 
mode  of  engraving  and  tinting  his  plates.  He  had 
made  the  sixty-five  designs  of  his  Days  of  Inno- 
cence, and  was  meditating,  he  said,  on  the  best 
means  of  multiplying  their  resemblance  in  form  and 
in  hue ;  he  felt  sorely  perplexed.  At  last  he  was 
made  aware  that  the  spirit  of  his  favourite  brother 
Eobert  was  in  the  room,  and  to  this  celestial  visitor 
he  applied  for  counsel.  The  spirit  advised  him  at 
once  :  '  write/  he  said,  '  the  poetry,  and  draw  the 
designs  upon  the  copper  with  a  certain  liquid  (which 
he  named,  and  which  Blake  ever  kept  a  secret) ; 
then  cut  the  plain  parts  of  the  plate  down  with 
aqua-fortis,  and  this  will  give  the  whole,  both  poetry 
and  figures,  in  the  manner  of  a  stereotype.'  The 
plan  recommended  by  this  gracious  spirit  was 
adopted  ;  the  plates  were  engraved,  and  the  work 
printed  off.  The  artist  then  added  a  peculiar 
beauty  of  his  own.  He  tinted  both  the  figures 
and  the  verse  with  a  variety  of  colours,  amongst 
which,  while  yellow  prevails,  the  whole  has  a  rich 
and  lustrous  beauty,  to  which  I  know  little  that 
can  be  compared.  The  size  of  these  prints  is  four 
inches  and  a  half  high  by  three  inches  wide.  The 
original  genius  of  Blake  was  always  confined, 
through  poverty,  to  small  dimensions.  Sixty-five 
plates  of  copper  were  an  object  to  him  who  had 
little  money.  The  Gates  of  Paradise,  a  work  of 
sixteen  designs,  and  those  exceedingly  small,  was 


404  WILLIAM   BLAKE 

his  next  undertaking.  The  meaning  of  the  artist 
is  not  a  little  obscure ;  it  seems  to  have  been  his 
object  to  represent  the  innocence,  the  happiness, 
and  the  upward  aspirations  of  man.  They  bespeak 
one  intimately  acquainted  with  the  looks  and  the 
feelings  of  children.  Over  them  there  is  shed  a 
kind  of  mysterious  halo  which  raises  feelings  of 
devotion.  The  Songs  of  Innocence,  and  the  Gates 
of  Paradise,  became  popular  among  the  collectors 
of  prints.  To  the  sketch  book  and  the  cabinet 
the  works  of  Blake  are  unfortunately  confined. 

If  there  be  mystery  in  the  meaning  of  the  Gates 
of  Paradise,  his  succeeding  performance,  by  name 
URIZEN,  has  the  merit  or  the  fault  of  surpassing  all 
human  comprehension.  The  spirit  which  dictated 
this  strange  work  was  undoubtedly  a  dark  one ; 
nor  does  the  strange  kind  of  prose  which  is  inter- 
mingled with  the  figures  serve  to  enlighten  us. 
There  are  in  all  twenty-seven  designs  representing 
beings  human,  demoniac,  and  divine,  in  situations 
of  pain  and  sorrow  and  suffering.  One  character 
— evidently  an  evil  spirit — appears  in  most  of  the 
plates ;  the  horrors  of  hell,  and  the  terrors  of  dark- 
ness and  divine  wrath,  seem  his  sole  portion.  He 
swims  in  gulphs  of  fire — descends  in  cataracts  of 
flame — holds  combats  with  scaly  serpents,  or 
writhes  in  anguish  without  any  visible  cause.  One 
of  his  exploits  is  to  chase  a  female  soul  through  a 
narrow  gate  and  hurl  her  headlong  down  into  a 
darksome  pit.  The  wild  verses  which  are  scat- 


LIFE  OF  BLAKE  405 

tered  here  and  there,  talk  of  the  sons  and  the 
daughters  of  Urizen.  He  seems  to  have  extracted 
these  twenty-seven  scenes  out  of  many  visions — 
what  he  meant  by  them  even  his  wife  declared  she 
could  not  tell,  though  she  was  sure  they  had  a 
meaning  and  a  fine  one.  Something  like  the  fall 
of  Lucifer  and  the  creation  of  Man  is  dimly  visible 
in  this  extravagant  work ;  it  is  not  a  little  fearful 
to  look  upon ;  a  powerful,  dark,  terrible  though 
undefined  and  indescribable  impression  is  left  on 
the  mind — and  it  is  in  no  haste  to  be  gone.  The 
size  of  the  designs  is  four  inches  by  six ;  they  bear 
date, '  Lambeth,  1794.'  He  had  left  Poland  Street 
and  was  residing' in  Hercules  Buildings. 

The  name  of  Blake  began  now  to  be  known  a 
little,  and  Edwards,  the  bookseller,  employed  him 
to  illustrate  Young's  Night  Thoughts.  The  reward 
in  money  was  small,  but  the  temptation  in  fame 
was  great :  the  work  was  performed  something  in 
the  manner  of  old  books  with  illuminated  margins. 
Along  the  ample  margins  which  the  poetry  left  on 
the  page  the  artist  sketched  his  fanciful  creations ; 
contracting  or  expanding  them  according  to  the 
space.  Some  of  those  designs  were  in  keeping 
with  the  poems,  but  there  were  others  which 
alarmed  fastidious  people :  the  serious  and  the 
pious  were  not  prepared  to  admire  shapes  trembling 
in  nudity  round  the  verses  of  a  grave  divine.  In 
the  exuberance  of  Young  there  are  many  fine 
figures ;  but  they  are  figures  of  speech  only,  on 


406  WILLIAM  BLAKE 

which  art  should  waste  none  of  its  skill.  This 
work  was  so  much,  in  many  parts,  to  the 
satisfaction  of  Flaxman,  that  he  introduced  Blake 
to  Hay  ley  the  poet,  who,  in  1800,  persuaded  him 
to  remove  to  Felpham  in  Sussex,  to  make  engrav- 
ings for  the  Life  of  Cowper.  To  that  place  he 
accordingly  went  with  his  wife  and  sister,  and  was 
welcomed  by  Hayley  with  much  affection.  Of  his 
journey  and  his  feelings  he  gives  the  following 
account  to  Flaxman,  whom  he  usually  addressed 
thus,  '  Dear  Sculptor  of  Eternity.' 

'  We  are  arrived  safe  at  our  cottage,  which  is 
more  beautiful  than  I  thought  it,  and  more  con- 
venient. It  is  a  perfect  model  for  cottages,  and  I 
think  for  palaces  of  magnificence,  only  enlarging 
and  not  altering  its  proportions,  and  adding  orna- 
ments and  not  principals.  Nothing  can  be  more 
grand  than  its  simplicity  and  usefulness.  Felpham 
is  a  sweet  place  for  study,  because  it  is  more 
spiritual  than  London.  Heaven  opens  here  on  all 
sides  her  golden  gates;  her  windows  are  not 
obstructed  by  vapours ;  voices  of  celestial  inhabi- 
tants are  more  distinctly  heard,  and  their  forms 
more  distinctly  seen,  and  my  cottage  is  also  a 
shadow  of  their  houses.  My  wife  and  sister 
are  both  well,  and  are  courting  Neptune  for  an 
embrace.' 

Thus  far  had  he  written  in  the  language  and 
feelings  of  a  person  of  upper  air ;  though  some  of 
the  expressions  are  tinctured  with  the  peculiar 


LIFE  OF  BLAKE  407 

enthusiasm  of  the  man,  they  might  find  shelter 
under  the  licence  of  figurative  speech,  and  pass 
duster  as  the  poetic  language  of  new-found 
happiness.  Blake  thus  continues  : — 

'And  now  begins  a  new  life,  because  another 
coiering  of  earth  is  shaken  off.  I  am  more  famed 
in  Leaven  for  my  works  than  I  could  well  conceive. 
In  niy  brain  are  studies  and  chambers  filled  with 
books  and  pictures  of  old,  which  I  wrote  and 
painted  in  ages  of  eternity  before  my  mortal  life, 
and  those  works  are  the  delight  and  study  of  arch- 
angels. Why  then  should  I  be  anxious  about  the 
riches  or  fame  of  mortality  ?  You,  0  dear  Flaxman, 
are  a  sublime  archangel,  my  friend  and  companion 
from  eternity.  Farewell,  my  dear  friend,  remem- 
ber me  and  my  wife  in  love  and  friendship  to  Mrs. 
Flaxman,  whom  we  ardently  desire  to  entertain 
beneath  our  thatched  roof  of  russet  gold/ 

This  letter,  written  in  the  year  1800,  gives  the 
true  twofold  image  of  the  author's  mind.  During 
the  day  he  was  a  man  of  sagacity  and  sense,  who 
handled  his  graver  wisely,  and  conversed  in  a 
wholesome  and  pleasant  manner;  in  the  evening, 
when  he  had  done  his  prescribed  task,  he  gave  a 
loose  to  his  imagination.  While  employed  on  those 
engravings  which  accompany  the  works  of  Cowper, 
he  saw  such  company  as  the  country  where  he 
resided  afforded,  and  talked  with  Hayley  about 
poetry  with  a  feeling  to  which  the  author  of  the 
Triumphs  of  Temper  was  an  utter  stranger ;  but  at 


408  WILLIAM  BLAKE 

the  close  of  day  away  went  Blake  to  the  seashore 
to  indulge  in  his  own  thoughts  and 

'  High  converse  with  the  dead  to  hold.' 

Here  he  forgot  the  present  moment  and  lived  in 
the  past ;  he  conceived,  verily,  that  he  had  lived 
in  other  days,  and  had  formed  friendships  with 
Homer  and  Moses  ;  with  Pindar  and  Virgil ;  vrith 
Dante  and  Milton.  These  great  men,  he  asserted, 
appeared  to  him  in  visions,  and  even  entered  into 
conversation.  Milton,  in  a  moment  of  confidence, 
intrusted  him  with  a  whole  poem  of  his,  which  the 
world  had  never  seen ;  but  unfortunately  the  com- 
munication was  oral,  and  the  poetry  seemed  to 
have  lost  much  of  its  brightness  in  Blake's  recita- 
tion. When  asked  about  the  looks  of  those  visions, 
he  answered,  'They  are  all  majestic  shadows,  gray 
but  luminous,  and  superior  to  the  common  height 
of  men.'  It  was  evident  that  the  solitude  of  the 
country  gave  him  a  larger  swing  in  imaginary 
matters.  His  wife  often  accompanied  him  to  these 
strange  interviews ;  she  saw  nothing  and  heard  as 
little,  but  she  was  certain  that  her  husband  both 
heard  and  saw. 

Blake's  mind  at  all  times  resembled  that  first 
page  in  the  magician's  book  of  gramoury,  which 
made 

'  The  cobweb  on  the  dungeon  wall, 
Seem  tapestry  in  lordly  hall.' 

His  mind  could  convert  the  most  ordinary  occur- 


LIFE  OF  BLAKE  409 

reuce  into  something  mystical  and  supernatural. 
He  often  saw  less  majestic  shapes  than  those  of  the 
poets  of  old.  '  Did  you  ever  see  a  fairy's  funeral, 
madam  ? '  he  once  said  to  a  lady,  who  happened  to 
sit  by  him  in  company.  '  Never,  sir ! '  was  the 
answer.  '  I  have/  said  Blake,  '  but  not  before 
last  night.  I  was  walking  alone  in  my  garden, 
there  was  great  stillness  among  the  branches  and 
flowers  and  more  than  common  sweetness  in  the  air ; 
I  heard  a  low  and  pleasant  sound,  and  I  knew  not 
whence  it  came.  At  last  I  saw  the  broad  leaf  of  a 
flower  move,  and  underneath  I  saw  a  procession  of 
creatures  of  the  size  and  colour  of  green  and  gray 
grasshoppers,  bearing  a  body  laid  out  on  a  rose 
leaf,  which  they  buried  with  songs,  and  then  dis- 
appeared. It  was  a  fairy  funeral.'  It  would,  per- 
haps, have  been  better  for  his  fame  had  he 
connected  it  more  with  the  superstitious  beliefs  of 
his  country — amongst  the  elves  and  fairies  his 
fancy  might  have  wandered  at  will — their  popular 
character  would  perhaps  have  kept  him  within  the 
bounds  of  traditionary  belief,  and  the  sea  of  his 
imagination  might  have  had  a  shore. 

After  a  residence  of  three  years  in  his  cottage  at 
Felpham,  he  removed  to  17  South  Molton  Street, 
London,  where  he  lived  seventeen  years.  He  came 
back  to  town  with  a  fancy  not  a  little  exalted  by  the 
solitude  of  the  country,  and  in  this  mood  designed 
and  engraved  an  extensive  and  strange  work  which 
he  entitled  '  Jerusalem'  A  production  so  exclu- 


410  WILLIAM  BLAKE 

sively  wild  was  not  allowed  to  make  its  appear- 
ance in  an  ordinary  way :  he  thus  announced  it. 
'  After  my  three  years'  slumber  on  the  banks  of  the 
ocean,  I  again  display  my  giant  forms  to  the 
public.'  Of  those  designs  there  are  no  less  than 
an  hundred ;  what  their  meaning  is  the  artist  has 
left  unexplained.  It  seems  of  a  religious,  politi- 
cal, and  spiritual  kind,  and  wanders  from  hell  to 
heaven  and  from  heaven  to  earth ;  now  glancing 
into  the  distractions  of  our  own  days,  and  then 
making  a  transition  to  the  antediluvians.  The 
crowning  defect  is  obscurity  ;  meaning  seems  now 
and  then  about  to  dawn ;  you  turn  plate  after  plate 
and  read  motto  after  motto,  in  the  hope  of  escaping 
from  darkness  into  light.  But  the  first  might  as 
well  be  looked  at  last ;  the  whole  seems  a  riddle 
which  no  ingenuity  can  solve.  Yet,  if  the  work  be 
looked  at  for  form  and  effect  rather  than  for  mean- 
ing, many  figures  may  be  pronounced  worthy  of 
Michael  Angelo.  There  is  wonderful  freedom  of 
attitude  and  position ;  men,  spirits,  gods,  and  an- 
gels, move  with  an  ease  which  makes  one  lament 
that  we  know  not  wherefore  they  are  put  in  motion. 
Well  might  Hayley  call  him  his  '  gentle  visionary 
Blake/  He  considered  the  Jerusalem  to  be  his 
greatest  work,  and  for  a  set  of  the  tinted  engravings 
he  charged  twenty-five  guineas.  Few  joined  the 
artist  in  his  admiration.  The  Jerusalem,  with  all 
its  giant  forms,  failed  to  force  its  way  into 
circulation. 


LIFE   OF  BLAKE  411 

His  next  work  was  the  Illustrations  of  Blair's 
Grave,  which  came  to  the  world  with  the  following 
commendation  by  Fuseli  :  '  The  author  of  the 
moral  series  before  us  has  endeavoured  to  awaken 
sensibility  by  touching  our  sympathies  with  nearer, 
less  ambiguous  and  less  ludicrous  imagery,  than 
what  mythology,  Gothic  superstition,  or  symbols  as 
far  fetched  as  inadequate  could  supply.  His 
avocation  has  been  chiefly  employed  to  spread  a 
familiar  and  domestic  atmosphere  round  the  most 
important  of  all  subjects,  to  connect  the  visible  and 
the  invisible  world  without  provoking  probability, 
and  to  lead  the  eye  from  the  milder  light  of  time  to 
the  radiations  of  eternity.'  For  these  twelve  '  In- 
ventions,' as  he  called  them,  Blake  received  twenty 
guineas  from  Cromeck,  the  engraver — a  man  of 
skill  in  art  and  taste  in  literature.  The  price  was 
little,  but  nevertheless  it  was  more  than  what  he 
usually  received  for  such  productions  ;  he  also 
undertook  to  engrave  them.  But  Blake's  mode  of 
engraving  was  as  peculiar  as  his  style  of  designing ; 
it  had  little  of  that  grace  of  execution  about  it, 
which  attracts  customers,  and  the  Inventions,  after 
an  experiment  or  two,  were  placed  under  the 
fashionable  graver  of  Louis  Schiavonetti.  Blake 
was  deeply  incensed — he  complained  that  he  was 
deprived  of  the  profit  of  engraving  his  own  designs, 
and,  with  even  less  justice,  that  Schiavonetti  was 
unfit  for  the  task. 

Some  of  these  twelve  'Inventions 'are  natural  and 


412  WILLIAM  BLAKE 

poetic,  others  exhibit  laborious  attempts  at  the 
terrific  and  the  sublime.  The  old  Man  at  Death's 
Door  is  one  of  the  best — in  the  Last  Day  there  are 
fine  groups  and  admirable  single  figures — the  Wise 
Ones  of  the  Earth  pleading  before  the  inexorable 
Throne,  and  the  Descent  of  the  Condemned,  are 
creations  of  a  high  order.  The  Death  of  the 
Strong  Wicked  Man  is  fearful  and  extravagant, 
and  the  flames  in  which  the  soul  departs  from  the 
body  have  no  warrant  in  the  poem  or  in  belief. 
The  Descent  of  Christ  into  the  Grave  is  formal 
and  tame,  and  the  hoary  old  Soul  in  the  Death  of 
the  Good  Man,  travelling  heavenward  between  two 
orderly  Angels,  required  little  outlay  of  fancy. 
The  frontispiece — a  naked  Angel  descending  head- 
long and  rousing  the  Dead  with  the  Sound  of  the 
last  Trumpet — alarmed  the  devout  people  of  the 
north,  and  made  maids  and  matrons  retire  behind 
their  fans. 

If  the  tranquillity  of  Blake's  life  was  a  little  dis- 
turbed by  the  dispute  about  the  twelve  '  Inven- 
tions,' it  was  completely  shaken  by  the  controversy 
which  now  arose  between  him  and  Cromeck 
respecting  his  Canterbury  Pilgrimage.  That  two 
artists  at  one  and  the  same  time  should  choose  the 
same  subject  for  the  pencil,  seems  scarcely  credible 
— especially  when  such  subject  was  not  of  a 
temporary  interest.  The  coincidence  here  was  so 
close,  that  Blake  accused  Stothard  of  obtaining 
knowledge  of  his  design  through  Cromeck,  while 


LIFE   OF  BLAKE  413 

Stothard  with  equal  warmth  asserted  that  Blake 
had  commenced  his  picture  in  rivalry  of  himself. 
Blake  declared  that  Cromeck  had  actually  com- 
missioned him  to  paint  the  Pilgrimage  before 
Stothard  thought  of  his  ;  to  which  Cromeck  replied, 
that  the  order  had  been  given  in  a  vision,  for  he 
never  gave  it.  Stothard,  a  man  as  little  likely  to 
be  led  aside  from  truth  by  love  of  gain  as  by 
visions,  added  to  Cromeck's  denial  the  startling 
testimony  that  Blake  visited  him  during  the  early 
progress  of  his  picture,  and  expressed  his  approba- 
tion of  it  in  such  terms,  that  he  proposed  to 
introduce  Blake's  portrait  in  the  procession,  as  a 
mark  of  esteem.  It  is  probable  that  Blake  obeyed 
some  imaginary  revelation  in  this  matter,  and 
mistook  it  for  the  order  of  an  earthly  employer  ; 
but  whether  commissioned  by  a  vision  or  by  mortal 
lips,  his  Canterbury  Pilgrimage  made  its  appear- 
ance in  an  exhibition  of  his  principal  works  in  the 
house  of  his  brother,  in  Broad  Street,  during  the 
summer  of  1809. 

Of  original  designs,  this  singular  exhibition  con- 
tained sixteen — they  were  announced  as  chiefly 
'  of  a  spiritual  and  political  nature ' — but  then  the 
spiritual  works  and  political  feelings  of  Blake  were 
unlike  those  of  any  other  man.  One  piece  repre- 
sented 'The  Spiritual  Form  of  Nelson  guiding 
Leviathan.'  Another,  'The  Spiritual  Form  of 
Seth  guiding  Behemoth.'  This,  probably,  con- 
founded both  divines  and  politicians ;  there  is  no 


414  WILLIAM  BLAKE 

doubt  that  plain  men  went  wondering  away.  The 
chief  attraction  was  the  Canterbury  Pilgrimage, 
not  indeed  from  its  excellence,  but  from  the  circum- 
stance of  its  origin,  which  was  well  known  about 
town,  and  pointedly  alluded  to  in  the  catalogue. 
The  picture  is  a  failure.  Blake  was  too  great  a 
visionary  for  dealing  with  such  literal  wantons  as 
the  Wife  of  Bath  and  her  jolly  companions.  The 
natural  flesh  and  blood  of  Chaucer  prevailed  against 
him.  He  gives  grossness  of  body  for  grossness  of 
mind, — tries  to  be  merry  and  wicked — and  in 
vain. 

Those  who  missed  instruction  in  his  pictures, 
found  entertainment  in  his  catalogue,  a  wild  per- 
formance, overflowing  with  the  oddities  and  dreams 
of  the  author — which  may  be  considered  as  a  kind 
of  public  declaration  of  his  faith  concerning  art  and 
artists.  His  first  anxiety  is  about  his  colours. 
'  Colouring,'  says  this  new  lecturer  on  the  Chiaro- 
scuro, '  does  not  depend  on  where  the  colours  are 
put,  but  on  where  the  lights  and  darks  are  put,  and 
all  depends  on  form  or  outline.  Where  that  is 
wroDg  the  colouring  never  can  be  right,  and  it  is 
always  wrong  in  Titian  and  Corregio,  Eubens  and 
Rembrandt ;  till  we  get  rid  of  them  we  shall  never 
equal  Eaphael  and  Albert  Durer,  Michael  Angelo 
and  Julio  Romano.  Clearness  and  precision  have 
been  my  chief  objects  in  painting  these  pictures — 
clear  colours  and  firm  determinate  lineaments,  un- 
broken by  shadows — which  ought  to  display  and 


LIFE  OF  BLAKE  415 

not  hide  form,  as  in  the  practice  of  the  later 
schools  of  Italy  and  Flanders.  The  picture  of  the 
Spiritual  Form  of  Pitt  is  a  proof  of  the  power  of 
colours  unsullied  with  oil  or  with  any  cloggy 
vehicle.  Oil  has  been  falsely  supposed  to  give 
strength  to  colours,  but  a  little  consideration  must 
show  the  fallacy  of  this  opinion.  Oil  will  not 
drink  or  absorb  colour  enough  to  stand  the  test  of 
any  little  time  and  of  the  air.  Let  the  works  of 
artists  since  Rubens'  time  witness  to  the  villainy  of 
those  who  first  brought  oil-painting  into  general 
opinion  and  practice,  since  which  we  have  never 
had  a  picture  painted  that  would  show  itself  by  the 
side  of  an  earlier  composition.  This  is  an  awful 
thing  to  say  to  oil-painters ;  they  may  call  it  mad- 
ness, but  it  is  true.  All  the  genuine  old  little 
pictures  are  in  fresco  and  not  in  oil.' 

Having  settled  the  true  principles  and  proper 
materials  of  colour,  he  proceeds  to  open  up  the 
mystery  of  his  own  productions.  Those  who  failed 
to  comprehend  the  pictures  on  looking  at  them,  had 
only  to  turn  to  the  following  account  of  the  Pitt 
and  the  Nelson.  'These  two  pictures/  he  says, 
'  are  compositions  of  a  mythological  cast,  similar  to 
those  Apotheoses  of  Persian,  Hindoo,  and  Egyptian 
antiquity,  which  are  still  preserved  in  rude  monu- 
ments, being  copies  from  some  stupendous  originals 
now  lost  or  perhaps  buried  to  some  happier  age. 
The  artist  having  been  taken,  in  vision,  to  the 
ancient  republics,  monarchies,  and  patriarchates  of 


416  WILLIAM  BLAKE 

Asia,  has  seen  those  wonderful  originals,  called  in 
the  sacred  Scriptures  the  cherubim,  which  were 
painted  and  sculptured  on  the  walls  of  temples, 
towns,  cities,  palaces,  and  erected  in  the  highly 
cultivated  states  of  Egypt,  Moab,  and  Edom,  among 
the  rivers  of  Paradise,  being  originals  from  which 
the  Greeks  and  Hetrurians  copied  Hercules,  Venus, 
Apollo,  and  all  the  groundworks  of  ancient  art. 
They  were  executed  in  a  very  superior  style  to 
those  justly  admired  copies,  being  with  their 
accompaniments  terrific  and  grand  in  the  highest 
degree.  The  artist  has  endeavoured  to  emulate  the 
grandeur  of  those  seen  in  his  vision,  and  to  apply 
it  to  modern  times  on  a  smaller  scale.  The  Greek 
Muses  are  daughters  of  Memory,  and  not  of  Inspir- 
ation or  Imagination,  and  therefore  not  authors  of 
such  sublime  conceptions  ;  some  of  these  wonderful 
originals  were  one  hundred  feet  in  height;  some 
were  painted  as  pictures,  some  were  carved  as  bass- 
relievos,  and  some  as  groups  of  statues,  all  con- 
taining mythological  and  recondite  meaning.  The 
artist  wishes  it  was  now  the  fashion  to  make  such 
monuments,  and  then  he  should  not  doubt  of 
having  a  national  commission  to  execute  those 
pictures  of  Nelson  and  Pitt  on  a  scale  suitable  to 
the  grandeur  of  the  nation  who  is  the  parent  of  his 
heroes,  in  highly  finished  fresco,  where  the  colours 
would  be  as  permanent  as  precious  stones.' 

The  man  who  could  not  only  write  down,  but 
deliberately  correct  the  printer's  sheets  which  re- 


LIFE  OF  BLAKE  417 

corded,  matter  so  utterly  wild  and  rnad,  was  at  the 
same  time  perfectly  sensible  to  the  exquisite  nature 
of  Chaucer's  delineations,  and  felt  rightly  what  sort 
of  skill  his  inimitable  Pilgrims  required  at  the 
hand  of  an  artist.  He  who  saw  visions  in  Ccele- 
Syria  and  statues  an  hundred  feet  high,  wrote  thus 
concerning  Chaucer:  'The  characters  of  his  pil- 
grims are  the  characters  which  compose  all  ages 
and  nations :  as  one  age  falls  another  rises,  differ- 
ent to  mortal  sight,  but  to  immortals  only  the  same  : 
for  we  see  the  same  characters  repeated  again  and 
again,  in  animals,  in  vegetables,  and  in  men ; 
nothing  new  occurs  in  identical  existence.  Acci- 
dent ever  varies ;  substance  can  never  suffer 
change  nor  decay.  Of  Chaucer's  characters,  some 
of  the  names  or  titles  are  altered  by  time,  but  the 
characters  themselves  for  ever  remain  unaltered, 
and  consequently  they  are  the  physiognomies  of 
universal  human  life,  beyond  which  nature  never 
steps.  Names  alter — things  never  alter ;  I  have 
known  multitudes  of  those  who  would  have  been 
monks  in  the  age  of  monkery,  who  in  this  deistical 
age  are  deists.  As  Linnaeus  numbered  the  plants, 
so  Chaucer  numbered  the  classes  of  men.' 

His  own  notions  and  much  of  his  peculiar  prac- 
tice in  art  are  scattered  at  random  over  the  pages 
of  this  curious  production.  His  love  of  a  distinct 
outline  made  him  use  close  and  clinging  dresses ; 
they  are  frequently  very  graceful — at  other  times 
they  are  constrained,  and  deform  the  figures  which 
2D 


418  WILLIAM  BLAKE 

they  so  scantily  cover.  '  The  great  and  golden  rule 
of  art  (says  he)  is  this : — that  the  more  distinct 
and  sharp  and  wiry  the  bounding  line,  the  more 
perfect  the  work  of  art ;  and  the  less  keen  and 
sharp  this  external  line,  the  greater  is  the  evidence 
of  weak  imitative  plagiarism  and  bungling :  Proto- 
genes  and  Apelles  knew  each  other  by  this  line. 
How  do  we  distinguish  the  oak  from  the  beech  ; 
the  horse  from  the  ox,  but  by  the  bounding  outline  ? 
How  do  we  distinguish  one  face  or  countenance 
from  another,  but  by  the  bounding  line  and  its 
infinite  inflexions  and  movements  ?  Leave  out  this 
line  and  you  leave  out  life  itself:  all  is  chaos 
again,  and  the  line  of  the  Almighty  must  be  drawn 
out  upon  it  before  man  or  beast  can  exist.' 

These  abominations — concealed  outline  and  tricks 
of  colour — now  bring  on  one  of  those  visionary  fits 
to  which  Blake  was  so  liable,  and  he  narrates  with 
the  most  amusing  wildness  sundry  revelations  made 
to  him  concerning  them.  He  informs  us  that 
certain  painters  were  demons — let  loose  on  earth  to 
confound  the  '  sharp  wiry  outline,'  and  fill  men's 
minds  with  fears  and  perturbations.  He  signifies 
that  he  himself  was  for  some  time  a  miserable 
instrument  in  the  hands  of  Chiaro-Scuro  demons, 
who  employed  him  in  making  '  experiment  pictures 
in  oil.'  '  These  pictures,'  says  he,  '  were  the  result 
of  temptations  and  perturbations  labouring  to 
destroy  imaginative  power  by  means  of  that 
infernal  machine  called  Chiaro-Scuro,  in  the  hands 


LIFE  OF   BLAKE  419 

of  Venetian  and  Flemish  demons,  who  hate  the 
Roman  and  Venetian  schools.  They  cause  that 
everything  in  art  shall  become  a  machine ;  they 
cause  that  the  execution  shall  be  all  blocked  up 
with  brown  shadows ;  they  put  the  artist  in  fear 
and  doubt  of  his  own  original  conception.  The 
spirit  of  Titian  was  particularly  active  in  raising 
doubts  concerning  the  possibility  of  executing  with- 
out a  model.  Eubens  is  a  most  outrageous  demon, 
and  by  infusing  the  remembrances  of  his  pictures, 
and  style  of  execution,  hinders  all  power  of 
individual  thought.  Corregio  is  a  soft  and  effemi- 
nate, consequently  a  most  cruel  demon,  whose 
whole  delight  is  to  cause  endless  labour  to  whoever 
suffers  him  to  enter  his  mind.'  When  all  this  is 
translated  into  the  language  of  sublunary  life,  it 
only  means  that  Blake  was  haunted  with  the 
excellences  of  other  men's  works,  and,  finding 
himself  unequal  to  the  task  of  rivalling  the  soft  and 
glowing  colours  and  singular  effects  of  light  and 
shade  of  certain  great  masters,  betook  himself  to 
the  study  of  others  not  less  eminent,  who  happened 
to  have  laid  out  their  strength  in  outline. 

To  describe  the  conversations  which  Blake  held 
in  prose  with  demons  and  in  verse  with  angels, 
would  fill  volumes,  and  an  ordinary  gallery  could 
not  contain  all  the  heads  which  he  drew  of  his 
visionary  visitants.  That  all  this  was  real,  he  him- 
self most  sincerely  believed ;  nay,  so  infectious 
was  his  enthusiasm,  that  some  acute  and  sensible 


420  WILLIAM  BLAKE 

persons  who  heard  him  expatiate,  shook  their  heads, 
and  hinted  that  he  was  an  extraordinary  man,  and 
that  there  might  be  something  in  the  matter.  One 
of  his  brethren,  an  artist  of  some  note,  employed 
him  frequently  in  drawing  the  portraits  of  those 
who  appeared  to  him  in  visions.  The  most  pro- 
pitious time  for  those  '  angel- visits '  was  from  nine 
at  night  till  five  in  the  morning ;  and  so  docile  were 
his  spiritual  sitters,  that  they  appeared  at  the  wish 
of  his  friends.  Sometimes,  however,  the  shape 
which  he  desired  to  draw  was  long  in  appearing, 
and  he  sat  with  his  pencil  and  paper  ready  and 
his  eyes  idly  roaming  in  vacancy ;  all  at  once  the 
vision  came  upon  him,  and  he  began  to  work  like 
one  possest. 

He  was  requested  to  draw  the  likeness  of  Sir 
William  Wallace — the  eye  of  Blake  sparkled,  for 
he  admired  heroes.  '  William  Wallace  ! '  he  ex- 
claimed, 'I  see  him  now — there,  there,  how  noble 
he  looks — reach  me  my  things  ! '  Having  drawn 
for  some  time,  with  the  same  care  of  hand  and 
steadiness  of  eye,  as  if  a  living  sitter  had  been 
before  him,  Blake  stopped  suddenly,  and  said,  '  I 
cannot  finish  him — Edward  the  First  has  stept  in 
between  him  and  me.'  'That's  lucky,'  said  his 
friend,  '  for  I  want  the  portrait  of  Edward  too.' 
Blake  took  another  sheet  of  paper,  and  sketched 
the  features  of  Plantagenet;  upon  which  his 
majesty  politely  vanished,  and  the  artist  finished 
the  head  of  Wallace.  'And  pray,  sir,'  said  a 


LIFE  OF  BLAKE  421 

gentleman,  who  heard  Blake's  friend  tell  his  story 
— '  was  Sir  William  Wallace  an  heroic-looking 
man  ?  And  what  sort  of  personage  was  Edward  ? ' 
The  answer  was :  '  There  they  are,  sir,  both  framed 
and  hanging  on  the  wall  behind  you,  judge  for 
yourself.'  '  I  looked  (says  my  informant)  and  saw 
two  warlike  heads  of  the  size  of  common  life. 
That  of  Wallace  was  noble  and  heroic,  that  of 
Edward  stern  and  bloody.  The  first  had  the  front 
of  a  god,  the  latter  the  aspect  of  a  demon.' 

The  friend  who  obliged  me  with  these  anecdotes, 
on  observing  the  interest  which  I  took  in  the  sub- 
ject, said, '  I  know  much  about  Blake — I  was  his 
companion  for  nine  years.  I  have  sat  beside  him 
from  ten  at  night  till  three  in  the  morning,  some- 
times slumbering  and  sometimes  waking,  but  Blake 
never  slept ;  he  sat  with  a  pencil  and  paper  draw- 
ing portraits  of  those  whom  I  most  desired  to  see. 
I  will  show  you,  sir,  some  of  these  works.'  He 
took  out  a  large  book  filled  with  drawings,  opened 
it,  and  continued,  'Observe  the  poetic  fervour  of 
that  face — it  is  Pindar  as  he  stood  a  conqueror  in 
the  Olympic  games.  And  this  lovely  creature  is 
Corinna,  who  conquered  in  poetry  in  the  same 
place.  That  lady  is  Lais,  the  courtesan — with  the 
impudence  which  is  part  of  her  profession,  she 
stept  in  between  Blake  and  Corinna,  and  he  was 
obliged  to  paint  her  to  get  her  away.  There ! 
that  is  a  face  of  a  different  stamp — can  you  con- 
jecture who  he  is  ? '  '  Some  scoundrel,  I  should 


422  WILLIAM  BLAKE 

think,  sir.'  '  There  now — that  is  a  strong  proof 
of  the  accuracy  of  Blake — he  is  a  scoundrel  indeed ! 
The  very  individual  task-master  whom  Moses  slew 
in  Egypt.  And  who  is  this  now — only  imagine 
who  this  is  ? '  '  Other  than  a  good  one,  I  doubt, 
sir.'  '  You  are  right,  it  is  the  Devil — he  resembles, 
and  this  is  remarkable,  two  men  who  shall  be 
nameless  ;  one  is  a  great  lawyer,  and  the  other — I 
wish  I  durst  name  him — is  a  suborner  of  false 
witnesses.  This  other  head  now  ? — this  speaks  for 
itself — it  is  the  head  of  Herod ;  how  like  an 
eminent  officer  in  the  army  ! ' 

He  closed  the  book,  and  taking  out  a  small 
panel  from  a  private  drawer,  said,  '  This  is  the  last 
which  I  shall  show  you ;  but  it  is  the  greatest 
curiosity  of  all.  Only  look  at  the  splendour  of  the 
colouring  and  the  original  character  of  the  thing  ! ' 
'  I  see,'  said  I,  '  a  naked  figure  with  a  strong  body 
and  a  short  neck — with  burning  eyes  which  long 
for  moisture,  and  a  face  worthy  of  a  murderer, 
holding  a  bloody  cup  in  its  clawed  hands,  out  of 
which  it  seems  eager  to  drink.  I  never  saw  any 
shape  so  strange,  nor  did  I  ever  see  any  colouring 
so  curiously  splendid — a  kind  of  glistening  green 
and  dusky  gold,  beautifully  varnished.  But  what 
in  the  world  is  it  ? '  '  It  is  a  ghost,  sir — the  ghost 
of  a  flea — a  spiritualisation  of  the  thing  ! '  '  He 
saw  this  in  a  vision  then,'  I  said.  '  I  '11  tell  you 
all  about  it,  sir.  I  called  on  him  one  evening,  and 
found  Blake  more  than  usually  excited.  He  told 


LIFE  OF  BLAKE  423 

me  he  had  seen  a  wonderful  thing — the  ghost  of  a 
flea  !  And  did  you  make  a  drawing  of  him  ?  I 
inquired.  No,  indeed,  said  he,  I  wish  I  had,  but  I 
shall,  if  he  appears  again !  He  looked  earnestly 
into  a  corner  of  the  room,  and  then  said,  here  he  is 
— reach  me  my  things — I  shall  keep  my  eye  on 
him.  There  he  comes !  his  eager  tongue  whisking 
out  of  his  mouth,  a  cup  in  his  hand  to  hold  blood 
and  covered  with  a  scaly  skin  of  gold  and  green ; — 
as  he  described  him  so  he  drew  him/ 

These  stories  are  scarcely  credible,  yet  there 
can  be  no  doubt  of  their  accuracy.  Another  friend, 
on  whose  veracity  I  have  the  fullest  dependence, 
called  one  evening  on  Blake,  and  found  him  sitting 
with  a  pencil  and  a  panel,  drawing  a  portrait  with 
all  the  seeming  anxiety  of  a  man  who  is  conscious 
that  he  has  got  a  fastidious  sitter ;  he  looked  and 
drew,  and  drew  and  looked,  yet  no  living  soul  was 
visible.  '  Disturb  me  not,'  said  he,  in  a  whisper, 
'  I  have  one  sitting  to  me.'  *  Sitting  to  you ! ' 
exclaimed  his  astonished  visitor,  '  where  is  he,  and 
what  is  he  ? — I  see  no  one/  '  But  I  see  him,  sir/ 
answered  Blake  haughtily,  'there  he  is,  his  name 
is  Lot — you  may  read  of  him  in  the  Scripture. 
He  is  sitting  for  his  portrait/ 

Had  he  always  thought  so  idly,  and  wrought  on 
such  visionary  matters,  this  memoir  would  have 
been  the  story  of  a  madman,  instead  of  the  life 
of  a  man  of  genius,  some  of  whose  works  are 
worthy  of  any  age  or  nation.  Even  while  he  was 


424  WILLIAM  BLAKE 

indulging  in  these  laughable  fancies,  and  seeing 
visions  at  the  request  of  his  friends,  he  conceived, 
and  drew,  and  engraved,  one  of  the  noblest  of  all 
his  productions — the  Inventions  for  the  Book  of  Job. 
He  accomplished  this  series  in  a  small  room,  which 
served  him  for  kitchen,  bedchamber,  and  study, 
where  he  had  no  other  companion  but  his  faithful 
Katherine,  and  no  larger  income  than  some  seven- 
teen or  eighteen  shillings  a  week.  Of  these 
Inventions,  as  the  artist  loved  to  call  them,  there 
are  twenty-one,  representing  the  Man  of  Uz  sus- 
taining his  dignity  amidst  the  inflictions  of  Satan, 
the  reproaches  of  his  friends,  and  the  insults  of  his 
wife.  It  was  in  such  things  that  Blake  shone  ;  the 
Scripture  overawed  his  imagination,  and  he  was  too 
devout  to  attempt  aught  beyond  a  literal  embody- 
ing of  the  majestic  scene.  He  goes  step  by  step 
with  the  narrative ;  always  simple,  and  often  sub- 
lime— never  wandering  from  the  subject,  nor 
overlaying  the  text  with  the  weight  of  his  own 
exuberant  fancy. 

The  passages,  embodied,  will  show  with  what 
lofty  themes  he  presumed  to  grapple.  1.  Thus 
did  Job  continually.  2.  The  Almighty  watches  the 
good  man's  household.  3.  Satan  receiving  power 
over  Job.  4.  The  wind  from  the  wilderness 
destroying  Job's  children.  5.  And  I  alone  am 
escaped  to  tell  thee.  6.  Satan  smiting  Job  with 
sore  boils.  7.  Job's  friends  comforting  him. 
8.  Let  the  day  perish  wherein  I  was  born.  9.  Then 


LIFE  OF  BLAKE  425 

a  spirit  passed  before  my  face.  10.  Job  laughed 
to  scorn  by  his  friends.  11.  With  dreams  upon 
my  bed  thou  scarest  me — thou  affrightest  me 
with  visions.  12.  I  am  young  and  ye  are  old, 
wherefore  I  was  afraid.  13.  Then  the  Lord 
answered  Job  out  of  the  whirlwind.  14.  When  the 
morning  stars  sang  together,  and  the  sons  of  God 
shouted  for  joy.  15.  Behold  now  Behemoth,  which 
I  made  with  thee.  16.  Thou  hast  fulfilled  the 
judgment  of  the  wicked.  17.  I  have  heard  thee 
with  the  hearing  of  my  ear,  but  now  my  eye 
rejoiceth  in  thee.  18.  Also  the  Lord  accepted  Job. 

19.  Every  one  also  gave  him  a  piece   of  money. 

20.  There  were  not  found  women  fairer  than  the 
daughters   of  Job.     21.  So  the  Lord  blessed  the 
latter  end  of  Job  more  than  the  beginning. 

While  employed  on  these  remarkable  produc- 
tions, he  was  made  sensible  that  the  little  approba- 
tion which  the  world  had  ever  bestowed  on  him 
was  fast  leaving  him.  The  waywardness  of  his 
fancy,  and  the  peculiar  execution  of  his  composi- 
tions, were  alike  unadapted  for  popularity ;  the 
demand  for  his  works  lessened  yearly  from  the 
time  that  he  exhibited  his  Canterbury  Pilgrimage ; 
and  he  could  hardly  procure  sufficient  to  sustain 
life,  when  old  age  was  creeping  upon  him.  Yet, 
poverty-stricken  as  he  was,  his  cheerfulness  never 
forsook  him — he  uttered  no  complaint — he  con- 
tracted no  debt,  and  continued  to  the  last  manly 
and  independent.  It  is  the  fashion  to  praise  genius 


426  WILLIAM  BLAKE 

when  it  is  gone  to  the  grave — the  fashion  is  cheap 
and  convenient.  Of  the  existence  of  Blake  few 
men  of  taste  could  be  ignorant — of  his  great 
merits  multitudes  knew,  nor  was  his  extreme 
poverty  any  secret.  Yet  he  was  reduced — one  of 
the  ornaments  of  the  age — to  a  miserable  garret  and 
a  crust  of  bread,  and  would  have  perished  from 
want,  had  not  some  friends,  neither  wealthy  nor 
powerful,  averted  this  disgrace  from  coming  upon 
our  country.  One  of  these  gentlemen,  Mr.  Linnell, 
employed  Blake  to  engrave  his  Inventions  of  the 
Book  of  Job ;  by  this  he  earned  money  enough  to 
keep  him  living — for  the  good  old  man  still 
laboured  with  all  the  ardour  of  the  days  of  his 
youth,  and  with  skill  equal  to  his  enthusiasm. 
These  engravings  are  very  rare,  very  beautiful,  and 
very  peculiar.  They  are  in  the  earlier  fashion  of 
workmanship,  and  bear  no  resemblance  whatever  to 
the  polished  and  graceful  style  which  now  prevails. 
I  have  never  seen  a  tinted  copy,  nor  am  I  sure 
that  tinting  would  accord  with  the  extreme 
simplicity  of  the  designs,  and  the  mode  in  which 
they  are  handled.  The  Songs  of  Innocence,  and 
these  Inventions  for  Job,  are  the  happiest  of  Blake's 
works,  and  ought  to  be  in  the  portfolios  of  all  who 
are  lovers  of  nature  and  imagination. 

Two  extensive  works,  bearing  the  ominous 
names  of  Prophecies,  one  concerning  America,  the 
other  Europe,  next  made  their  appearance  from 
his  pencil  and  graver.  The  first  contains  eighteen 


LIFE  OF  BLAKE  427 

and  the  other  seventeen  plates,  and  both  are  plenti- 
fully seasoned  with  verse,  without  the  incumbrance 
of  rhyme.  It  is  impossible  to  give  a  satisfactory 
description  of  these  works ;  the  frontispiece  of  the 
latter,  representing  the  Ancient  of  Days,  in  an  orb 
of  light,  stooping  into  chaos,  to  measure  out  the 
world,  has  been  admired  less  for  its  meaning  than 
for  the  grandeur  of  its  outline.  A  head  and  a  tail- 
piece in  the  other  have  been  much  noticed — one 
exhibits  the  bottom  of  the  sea,  with  enormous 
fishes  preying  on  a  dead  body — the  other,  the  sur- 
face, with  a  dead  body  floating,  on  which  an  eagle 
with  outstretched  wings  is  feeding.  The  two  angels 
pouring  out  the  spotted  plague  upon  Britain — an 
angel  standing  in  the  sun,  attended  by  three  furies 
— and  several  other  Inventions  in  these  wild  works, 
exhibit  wonderful  strength  of  drawing  and  splen- 
dour of  colouring.  Of  loose  prints — but  which 
were  meant  doubtless  to  form  part  of  some  exten- 
sive work — one  of  the  most  remarkable  is  the  Great 
Sea  Serpent ;  and  a  figure,  sinking  in  a  stormy  sea 
at  sunset — the  glow  of  which,  with  the  foam  upon 
the  dark  waves,  produces  a  magical  effect. 

After  a  residence  of  seventeen  years  in  South 
Molton  Street,  Blake  removed  (not  in  consequence, 
alas  !  of  any  increase  of  fortune)  to  No.  3  Foun- 
tain Court,  Strand.  This  was  in  the  year  1823. 
Here  he  engraved  by  day  and  saw  visions  by  night, 
and  occasionally  employed  himself  in  making  In- 
ventions for  Dante  ;  and  such  was  his  application 


428  WILLIAM  BLAKE 

that  he  designed  in  all  one  hundred  and  two,  and 
engraved  seven.  It  was  publicly  known  that  he 
was  in  a  declining  state  of  health  ;  that  old  age  had 
come  upon  him,  and  that  he  was  in  want.  Several 
friends,  and  artists  among  the  number,  aided  him  a 
little,  in  a  delicate  way,  by  purchasing  his  works, 
of  which  he  had  many  copies.  He  sold  many  of 
his  Songs  of  Innocence,  and  also  of  Urizen,  and 
he  wrought  incessantly  upon  what  he  counted  his 
masterpiece,  the  Jerusalem,  tinting  and  adorning 
it,  with  the  hope  that  his  favourite  would  find  a 
purchaser.  No  one,  however,  was  found  ready 
to  lay  out  twenty-five  guineas  on  a  work  which  no 
one  could  have  any  hope  of  comprehending,  and 
this  disappointment  sank  to  the  old  man's  heart. 

He  had  now  reached  his  seventy-first  year,  and 
the  strength  of  nature  was  fast  yielding.  Yet  he 
was  to  the  last  cheerful  and  contented.  '  I  glory,' 
he  said,  '  in  dying,  and  have  no  grief  but  in  leaving 
you,  Katherine  ;  we  have  lived  happy,  and  we  have 
lived  long ;  we  have  been  ever  together,  but  we 
shall  be  divided  soon.  Why  should  I  fear  death  ? 
nor  do  I  fear  it.  I  have  endeavoured  to  live  as 
Christ  commands,  and  have  sought  to  worship  God 
truly — in  my  own  house,  when  I  was  not  seen  of 
men.'  He  grew  weaker  and  weaker — he  could  no 
longer  sit  upright ;  and  was  laid  in  his  bed,  with 
no  one  to  watch  over  him,  save  his  wife,  who, 
feeble  and  old  herself,  required  help  in  such  a 
touching  duty. 


LIFE  OF  BLAKE  429 

The  Ancient  of  Days  was  such  a  favourite  with 
Blake,  that  three  days  before  his  death,  he  sat 
bolstered  up  in  bed,  and  tinted  it  with  his  choicest 
colours  and  in  his  happiest  style.  He  touched 
and  retouched  it — held  it  at  arm's-length,  and  then 
threw  it  from  him,  exclaiming,  '  There !  that  will 
do !  I  cannot  mend  it.'  He  saw  his  wife  in  tears 
— she  felt  this  was  to  be  the  last  of  his  works — 
'  Stay,  Kate  !  (cried  Blake)  keep  just  as  you  are — 
I  will  draw  your  portrait — for  you  have  ever  been 
an  angel  to  me ' — she  obeyed,  and  the  dying  artist 
made  a  fine  likeness. 

The  very  joyfulness  with  which  this  singular 
man  welcomed  the  coming  of  death,  made  his  dying 
moments  intensely  mournful.  He  lay  chaunting 
songs,  and  the  verses  and  the  music  were  both  the 
offspring  of  the  moment.  He  lamented  that  he 
could  no  longer  commit  those  inspirations,  as  he 
called  them,  to  paper.  'Kate,'  he  said,  'I  am 
a  changing  man — I  always  rose  and  wrote  down 
my  thoughts,  whether  it  rained,  snowed,  or  shone, 
and  you  arose  too  and  sat  beside  me — this  can  be 
no  longer.'  He  died  on  the  12th  of  August,  1828, 
without  any  visible  pain — his  wife,  who  sat 
watching  him,  did  not  perceive  when  he  ceased 
breathing. 

William  Blake  was  of  low  stature  and  slender 
make,  with  a  high  pallid  forehead,  and  eyes  large, 
dark,  and  expressive.  His  temper  was  touchy,  and 
when  moved,  he  spoke  with  an  indignant  eloquence, 


430  WILLIAM  BLAKE 

which  commanded  respect.  His  voice,  in  general, 
was  low  and  musical,  his  manners  gentle  and  un- 
assuming, his  conversation  a  singular  mixture  of 
knowledge  and  enthusiasm.  His  whole  life  was 
one  of  labour  and  privation, — he  had  never  tasted 
the  luxury  of  that  independence,  which  comes  from 
professional  profit.  This  untoward  fortune  he 
endured  with  unshaken  equanimity — offering  him- 
self, in  imagination,  as  a  martyr  in  the  great  cause 
of  poetic  art ; — pitying  some  of  his  more  fortunate 
brethren  for  their  inordinate  love  of  gain ;  and  not 
doubting  that  whatever  he  might  have  won  in  gold 
by  adopting  other  methods,  would  have  been  a  poor 
compensation  for  the  ultimate  loss  of  fame.  Under 
this  agreeable  delusion,  he  lived  all  his  life — he 
was  satisfied  when  his  graver  gained  him  a  guinea 
a  week — the  greater  the  present  denial,  the  surer 
the  glory  hereafter. 

Though  he  was  the  companion  of  Flaxman  and 
Fuseli,  and  sometimes  their  pupil,  he  never  attained 
that  professional  skill,  without  which  all  genius  is 
bestowed  in  vain.  He  was  his  own  teacher 
chiefly ;  and  self-instruction,  the  parent  occasionally 
of  great  beauties,  seldom  fails  to  produce  great 
deformities.  He  was  a  most  splendid  tinter,  but 
no  colourist,  and  his  works  were  all  of  small 
dimensions,  and  therefore  confined  to  the  cabinet 
and  the  portfolio.  His  happiest  flights,  as  well  as 
his  wildest,  are  thus  likely  to  remain  shut  up  from 
the  world.  If  we  look  at  the  man  through  his  best 


LIFE   OF  BLAKE  431 

and  most  intelligible  works,  we  shall  find  that  he 
who  could  produce  the  Songs  of  Innocence  and 
Experience,  the  Gates  of  Paradise,  and  the  Inven- 
tions for  Job,  was  the  possessor  of  very  lofty 
faculties,  with  no  common  skill  in  art,  and  more- 
over that,  both  in  thought  and  mode  of  treatment, 
he  was  a  decided  original.  But  should  we,  shutting 
our  eyes  to  the  merits  of  those  works,  determine  to 
weigh  his  worth  by  his  Urizen,  his  Prophecies 
of  Europe  and  America,  and  his  Jerusalem,  our 
conclusion  would  be  very  unfavourable  ;  we  would 
say  that,  with  much  freedom  of  composition  and 
boldness  of  posture,  he  was  unmeaning,  mystical, 
and  extravagant,  and  that  his  original  mode  of 
working  out  his  conceptions  was  little  better  than 
a  brilliant  way  of  animating  absurdity.  An 
overflow  of  imagination  is  a  failing  uncommon  in 
this  age,  and  has  generally  received  of  late  little 
quarter  from  the  critical  portion  of  mankind.  Yet 
imagination  is  the  life  and  spirit  of  all  great  works 
of  genius  and  taste ;  and,  indeed,  without  it,  the 
head  thinks  and  the  hand  labours  in  vain.  Ten 
thousand  authors  and  artists  rise  to  the  proper,  the 
graceful,  and  the  beautiful,  for  ten  who  ascend  into 
'the  heaven  of  invention.'  A  work — whether  from 
poet  or  painter — conceived  in  the  fiery  ecstasy  of 
imagination,  lives  through  every  limb ;  while  one 
elaborated  out  by  skill  and  taste  only  will  look,  in 
comparison,  like  a  withered  and  sapless  tree  beside 
one  green  and  flourishing.  Blake's  misfortune 


432  WILLIAM  BLAKE 

was  that  of  possessing  this  precious  gift  in  excess. 
His  fancy  overmastered  him — until  he  at  length 
confounded  '  the  mind's  eye  '  with  the  corporeal 
organ,  and  dreamed  himself  out  of  the  sympathies 
of  actual  life. 

His  method  of  colouring  was  a  secret  which  he 
kept  to  himself,  or  confided  only  to  his  wife ;  he 
believed  that  it  was  revealed  in  a  vision,  and  that 
he  was  bound  in  honour  to  conceal  it  from  the 
world.  '  His  modes  of  preparing  his  grounds,' 
says  Smith,  in  his  Supplement  to  the  Life  of 
Nollekens,  '  and  laying  them  over  his  panels  for 
painting,  mixing  his  colours,  and  manner  of  work- 
ing, were  those  which  he  considered  to  have  been 
practised  by  the  early  fresco  painters,  whose  pro- 
ductions still  remain  in  many  instances  vividly  and 
permanently  fresh.  His  ground  was  a  mixture  of 
whiting  and  carpenters'  glue,  which  he  passed  over 
several  times  in  the  coatings ;  his  colours  he  ground 
himself,  and  also  united  with  them  the  same  sort 
of  glue,  but  in  a  much  weaker  state.  He  would, 
in  the  course  of  painting  a  picture,  pass  a  very  thin 
transparent  wash  of  glue- water  over  the  whole  of 
the  parts  he  had  worked  upon,  and  then  proceed 
with  his  finishing.  He  had  many  secret  modes  of 
working,  both  as  a  colourist  and  an  engraver.  His 
method  of  eating  away  the  plain  copper,  and 
leaving  the  lines  of  his  subjects  and  his  words  as 
stereotype,  is,  in  my  mind,  perfectly  original.  Mrs. 
Blake  is  in  possession  of  the  secret,  and  she  ought 


LIFE  OF  BLAKE  433 

to  receive  something  considerable  for  its  com- 
munication, as  I  am  quite  certain  it  may  be  used 
to  advantage,  both  to  artists  and  literary  characters 
in  general.  The  affection  and  fortitude  of  this 
woman  entitled  her  to  much  respect.  She  shared 
her  husband's  lot  without  a  murmur,  set  her  heart 
solely  upon  his  fame,  and  soothed  him  in  those 
hours  of  misgiving  and  despondency  which  are  not 
unknown  to  the  strongest  intellects.  She  still  lives 
to  lament  the  loss  of  Blake — and  fed  it.' 


2E 


BY   THE  SAME  WRITER. 

Poems  (Collected  Edition  in  two  Volumes).     1902. 

An  Introduction  to  the  Study  of  Browning.    1886,  1906. 

Aubrey  Beardsley.    1898,  1905. 

The  Symbolist  Movement  in  Literature.    1899. 

Plays,  Acting,  and  Music.    1903. 

Cities.    1903. 

Studies  in  Prose  and  Verse.    1904. 

A  Book  of  Twenty  Songs.    1905. 

Spiritual  Adventures.    1905. 

The  Fool  of  the  World,  and  Other  Poems.    1906. 

Studies  in  Seven  Arts.    1906. 


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